X-FACTOR

X-Factor is as popular in Denmark as it is elsewhere in the world, and for the same reasons. The number of applicants goes up each year; and although last year's winner is quickly forgotten (Danish X-Factor winner is hardly a world-beating item on a singer's CV), we all tune in after Christmas in order to watch the process repeat itself. It helps that the weather outside is usually dark, cold and miserable; much better to stay inside in the warm on a Friday night, and be entertained. I particularly like watching it with my daughter.

The format is reassuringly familiar; best efforts, tension, criticism, decision time, tears for the losers. So it came as more than a bit of a shock last night when the presenter announced at 8.01pm on live television that one of the five remaining contestants had voluntarily decided to drop out of the programme. Since the series is on a countdown to the final three participants' shoot-out in two weeks' time, the air was completely taken out of the balloon, as the remaining four all went through to next week without a vote.

We are so used to people wanting to be in the public eye, at almost any cost, that a decision to forsake that publicity is genuinely newsworthy. Although nobody knows the person's precise reasons, it does seem to suggest an admirably mature temperament. He gets my vote.

Walter Blotscher