Simon Cowell has said he would rather axe The X Factor than see it suffer a slow and painful TV death.
After last year’s ratings slump, the media mogul has been forced to consider the end of his star-making machine.
He said: “I’d rather fall off the cliff on numbers than deteriorate slowly. That is like death from a thousand cuts.
“Now maybe that might mean with The X Factor we’d say in a year’s time, ‘Right, that’s the end of it. Let’s start something new.'”
We all know that without Cheryl and Simon on last year’s UK panel and some pretty dodgy acts (Cocozza, we’re looking at you), there was plenty of room for improvement.
But axed? Let’s not get too hasty, series 8 still managed to pull in an average of 12.36 million viewers every Saturday night. A drop of around 2.2 million on the previous series, but if Cowell was to return or the format had a shake-up – is there not hope for the ailing X Factor yet?
We’re not talking about putting Estelle on the panel either…
But Cowell has already got his sights on a new project: “We have got something in development which could replace it if we get to that point.”
