Chart Throb (Ben Elton)***

Ben Elton’s satire on The X Factor is extremely funny with some great characters. I haven’t watched much of The X Factor, and I don’t like the early stages where the judges are being wankers because they’re just really really mean. But it seems much funnier in a book.

Yes, Elton is making fun of real people. It’s not difficult at all to work out who the three judges are based on, but it’s more removed from laughing at real people and their dreams directly. I have to say, though, I actually prefer Rodney Root to his inspiration, Louis Walsh. Rodney has a wonderful air of incompetence that makes me want to hug him. I just love people who are less competent than me. I think I was supposed to dislike him and laugh at him, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying Rodney’s scenes. And maybe we are supposed to think he’s like Louis, but he actually reminds me of Andrew Whatsit – you know, the one who wasn’t George Michael - from Wham. As for the other judges, the horrible and lecherous Calvin Simms can only be based on one man, which leaves transsexual Beryl as an incarnation of… I’m sure you can guess.

The contestants are beautifully written as well. Even though I haven’t seen very much of the early stages, there is something very familiar about the pathetic inadequates who queue up to audition. Maybe even someone who didn’t know the programme at all would enjoy Elton’s clever and witty characterisations. Most people have met someone who could be described as desperate, and this is something that Elton portrays really well, in a variety of different ways.

But these people are not real characters: they are caricatures. Elton’s characters have almost no substance at all. It’s satisfying to read a chapter or two and get a good laugh about it, but, when it comes to developing storylines and characters, Chart Throb is lacking.

The audition stages take up most of the book. It annoyed me because I wanted to get the part that interest me most about X Factor style programmes. I was hoping that, once the finalists had been chosen, there would be more chance to get to know each character individually: a chance for them to turn into real characters instead of yet another stereotypical wannabe singer. But they never did. The live TV programmes did feature in the book, but were skimmed over in about half a page.

As a TV programme, The X Factor is, in a sense, a series of comic sketches with a few sob stories in between. And that’s fine. That sort of thing works really well on TV. But in a book, I want a little bit more than that. I want to know their inner thoughts, and not just about how they ‘want it so much’ because that’s kind of obvious. I like to get to know characters in a book… and I want to like them. There are plenty of poor pathetic sad people in Chart Throb whom I can’t quite bring myself to hate, but very few I like.

Elton’s contestants do have some very interesting back stories, but we find this out because Elton – or one of the judges - tells us. There’s little opportunity for us to watch them in action and draw our own conclusions. The contestants include the anorexic Georgie, a brave and certainly realistic addition to the story, but, in keeping with the spirit of the book, her situation was treated in a rather offhand fashion, so some of the impact was lost. I did feel more interested in Georgie than some of the others, and I almost got to like her, but there were so many characters, there wasn’t space in the book to get to know each one.

There is one human character in the book – Emma, who works on the production team. In many ways, the technical side is the most interesting part of the book. This look at the behind-the-scenes life was fascinating and not unconvincing. But only Emma really seems to have a life beyond the show, and that’s probably only because she gets sacked. Emma is a nice girl, but she very quickly succumbs to a case of Chick Lit Heroine Stupidity Syndrome. And then I stopped liking her. Once Emma has failed to kick Calvin Simms up the bum, there’s really no hope for her.

So, what were the finalists like? Who was the cutie, and who was the best singer? In other words, who was Leon and who was Rhydian? I’d like to tell you, but I don’t know. The people who seemed to be the best singers didn’t make it into the Final. I have no idea if most of the finalists can even sing, and I didn’t really care who won. There was one contestant who seemed a very nice person, so I suppose I wanted him to win more than the others, but I knew that, if he did win, Calvin would get away with something absolutely unspeakable, and Emma would be made to look even more of a twat than she did already.

And as for the big twist at the end – ridiculous. It did include a genuinely chilling moment, but there were two things wrong. Firstly – you don’t care whether the victim gets killed or not because it’s not like you like this person. Secondly – the twist stretches even my imagination too far. I suppose Elton really felt as though he needed a twist - one failing of the book was that judges were the people the book followed the most, and everything always seemed to be going more or less as planned for them. But Elton should have written a twist that was funny, believable, or ideally both. Not the crap thing he did choose. I wouldn’t mind so much, but Ben Elton is actually a really brilliant writer. He can do so much better than this (see Dead Famous), and I really wish he had.