Ges on the Box: X-Factor failures are stars of the show

BELTING out the sounds of the ’60s on the M6, I’m in my element. You can test me on any Beatles lyric — I’m spot on. Donovan, the Stones, Small Faces, The Monkees . . . I know them all.

And, if I say so myself — and I do — I’m not bad. In an enclosed car with the windows wound up.

In my heart-of-hearts I know I’m verging on tone deaf. Without the music in the background, you’d be hard pushed to guess I’m singing — let alone what.

Him Indoors (who actually has a half-decent voice) puts up with the noise because he loves me. And because it gives him an amusing 250-mile round-trip to see his mum every weekend.

But it would be over his dead body that I turned up to audition for the “X Factor”. Aside from the humiliation of being associated with such a failure, he’d hate Simon being rude to me.

So where are the loved ones of last Saturday night’s failures? The Lithuanian answer to The Cheeky Girls — The Dreamgirls — who might have looked the part but murdered “Angel”. They were even worse than Gabriela and Monica themselves — and that’s saying something. The Irish twins John and Edward whose forte could be comedy (“where do you see yourselves in 15 years?” asks Cheryl. “Older” came back the reply, quick as you like), but it ain’t as pop stars. Gemma, George and Maria of Triple Trouble fame proved that they are, actually, every bit as bad as other teenagers when they threw their mics in petulance. I could go on (how about Kyle? He was worse than me!) but I won’t.

To save you the agony, Danyl Johnson is going to win this year’s show. Remember — you heard it here first. So we don’t have to watch the next 15 episodes. Relief.

Instead we can watch “The Cube”. Him Indoors was a tad excited. “The Cube” is one of his all-time favourite films. It’s a psychological thriller in the Kafkaesque setting of a giant cube with 17,586 identical rooms (apart from their colour) and seven inmates who wake up there one morning not knowing how they arrived.

We’re never told what the cube is, why it was created or why the “inmates” were selected. We watch them die one by one as they try to escape, leaving just Kazan, an autistic savant, to walk out into a bright light. The 90-minute film ends. As my son said, it’s like peeling an orange and then throwing the peel and the fruit away. You can imagine the Phillip Schofield-hosted quiz show of the same name wasn’t really up Him Indoors’s street. I enjoyed it though.