A school-dinner lady with a nice-but-shouty voice, a personal trainer with a nice (if you like opera done to disco) voice, a karate black belt with a nice (if occasionally out-of-tune) voice: it has, according to the critics, been a dull old X Factor. Obviously, they’ve been looking in the wrong place, because while there’s a limit to how many times you can ring the changes with Eva Cassidy’s Songbird, the scope for astonishingly atrocious clothes on this show is seemingly infinite.

I suspect that they’re part of a cunningly plotted dramatic arc to fight off the ratings challenge from Strictly Come Dancing, where the tat factor is rather one note. With X Factor, one minute you’re fighting back the tears because a contestant has just revealed that his/her 108-year-old granny has bubonic plague, the next you’re holding your breath in case the metallic “taffeta” sausage tubes encasing Niki or Beverley set the series’ entire stock of fireworks off in one go. At which point Rhydian, the one with the opera voice and Hitler Youth hair, walks on in a sequined ensemble that would make Julian Clary balk, and someone presses a button marked “Glitter”, thus dumping the lefto-vers from Dannii Minogue’s and Sharon Osbourne’s make-up trollies onstage and the reassuring brand of camp that Saturday night TV does so well is resumed.

It’s all so brilliantly choreographed that the only mystery is where they find satin this cheap-looking, and why so many camel toes are allowed before the 9pm watershed. Entertaining though it undoubtedly is, it’s probably less fun for the contestants: Alisha (booted out in Week 5) looked ready for a fight when she walked on stage wearing a diamanté bow with the wingspan of a Boeing 707. As for poor Kimberley (given the push in Week 1) she was a pretty, normal-looking 19-year-old when she auditioned; by the time the stylists had worked her over she looked like a lifer from run amok in the wardrobe of a cut price looky-likey Dita Von Teese. And it’s surely no coincidence that after the appearance of the slimy jumpsuits that put the “ho” into Hope, the girl band dropped to joint bottom place, becoming No Hope.

Mind you, Rhydian appeared last Saturday night in an Alexander McQueen suit – possibly the only garment in the show’s history to have a matt finish – that bordered on the classy. This is not the pantomime costume we’ve come to cherish. What is going on? Do the stylists have the same budget each week, regardless of the number of contestants? Or do the judges know something we don’t, ie, who is going to win? Actually, unlike last year, the outcome is anyone’s guess. To identify the victor, stop chasing the talent and start watching those clothes.

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