Hollyoaks suddenly has a rival for its title of "best Sunday morning, watch while in bed, TV programme." Having battled and beaten Something For The Weekend over on BBC 2, a surprise enemy is now in play: X-Factor.
Whereas Hollyoaks has glamour and beauty to bring you back into the world after a heavy night out, X-Factor instantly makes you feel better about yourself as the great deluded line up to be humiliated by Simon Cowell and co.
Given that the prize of winning X-Factor is a bit hit-and-miss - for every Leona Lewis and a Shayne Ward there's a soon-forgotten winner too - it seems quite frightening that so many people can turn up to audition in the seeming belief they have a god-given right to be stars, even though God appears to have been less than generous when it came to giving them talent.
But it's just as well they do, because there are two parts of the X-Factor series worth watching: the auditions and the last few weeks before the winner is announced. The rest, including the tiresome bootcamp, can take place without me needing to watch it. I suspect that is when Hollyoaks will begin to catch my eye on a Sunday morning again.
And it's no surprise that snipers have been queuing up to suggest that Cheryl Cole is on the judging panel this year because she caught Simon Cowell's eye. Yes, she's far prettier than Sharon Osbourne who she replaced, but from what we've seen so far, she adds much more to the panel than Danni Mingoue, last year's inexplicable addition to the team.
She's been there, she's done it. She knows the nerves which comes singing for your life at an audition in some soul-less venue, hoping to be picked. She is proof that you can have a career on the back of a TV show like X-Factor. Which is good news for those who do have talent. But also bad news for the trash that trundles through like some limited-talent recycling plant.
If I was deluded enough to appear on X-Factor, I still like to think that I'd twig early on that if the cameras were following me intensely, it probably wasn't good news (unless I had a handy sob story to hand).
But I'm obviously in the minority on this one. Which is just as well, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to search YouTube for these beauties:
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