Steve Williams' posts in The X Factor 2018

Yes, it was going to be Popstars: Boy Meets Girl to create a duo, presumably in the hope they'd snog on camera and have blazing rows and so on. But that never happened. At the time, it felt like they'd just alternate between Popstars, Pop Idol and X Factor, but clearly they wanted Cowell on all the time and he'd only do X Factor, so that ended the other two. A bit of a shame, cos I liked Pop Idol and X Factor, with its contrived format, seemed a real step down.

Course, Popstars: The Rivals was nothing like the original Popstars, which was all pre-recorded on location, The Rivals just followed the Pop Idol template to the letter, the judges even sat on the same place on the set.

I've said this before but one thing I really liked about Popstars and Pop Idol was that they seemed really honest and were well up for discussing the mechanics of the show, so on the original Popstars nobody turned up to the auditions in Belfast and they admitted as such. And then on Pop Idol I there was all that discussion about Rik Waller being ill and potentially getting a bye, and they actually discussed this on air and invited the audience to ask the judges questions, so it felt like a show that was on the viewer's side and would happily reveal all this stuff to us. A real shame when X Factor started hyping everything up and boasting about ratings.

Well, they sort of did do it as a fly-on-the-wall documentary because Soapstars, like the original Popstars, didn't have a studio element, it was all filmed on location with an anonymous narrator, it was certainly more a documentary than a light entertainment show. And it didn't really work at all, Yvon Grace was awful, but also it was so hard for the audience to get a grip on what they were supposed to be looking for. You could tell if a contender on Popstars couldn't sing, but you never knew what the judges on Soapstars were or weren't seeing and why the contestants were or weren't any good. On the ALW ones it is mostly singing.

The other interesting thing about Soapstars is that it was part of an extremely short-lived attempt in the autumn of 2001 by ITV to rebrand Mondays as a young-skewing night, so they scheduled it on Mondays alongside the RTD drama Bob and Rose and The Sketch Show, and they did trailers saying "Monday's My Day" with the idea that it would be home to classy new drama and comedy (presumably thanks to The Premiership moving some stuff that would otherwise have been on Saturday teatime). And the whole thing lasted five weeks before they panicked at Bob and Rose's ratings and parachuted Denis Norden's Laughter File in there.