Who'd want to be famous? Judging by what's on TV apparently everyone, of all ages, including infants. And, if this trend of bringing more stages of life into the talent contest universe continues, no doubt ghosts soon as well (yeah, scoff now, but you won't when The Voice Afterlife hits screens in 2015).

For those of you harbouring fame-chasing desires, there’s a Kim Kardashian app featuring the ability to "create your own aspiring celebrity". You hear that? The mere act of aspiring to be a celebrity is apparently worthy as a playable feature of a game these days. I suppose it makes life easier for games developers: in the next Assassin’s Creed you’ll just aspire to be an assassin while working in a cafe for your uncle. The end game boss is a difficult customer.

Unfortunately, the end result of being constantly told we're entitled to be famous is some of the most awkward and uncomfortable television imaginable. On Channel 7's The X Factor you can see it on the contestants' faces: the belief they can sing, their eyes clouded by a self-deluding pestilential mist — known as the Fog of Cowell — before being faced with reality by judge Redfoo and company that they sound worse than a recently harpooned whale gurgling its last notes on an outcrop of sharp rocks.

Sunday's episode ran through a supercut of failed auditions, the nadir of which was Blurred Lines being performed by a middle-aged physicist. Admittedly it's a step up from Blurred Lines being performed by a middle-aged non-physicist (perhaps the kindest description of Robin Thicke that has ever been committed to print), but the choice to sing one of the most controversial, career-killing songs of recent memory was rather a foolish one. Especially when you seem like someone's well-meaning father who's got lost and wandered on stage by accident.

If people aren’t deluding themselves, there were also a couple of contestants who'd been spurred on by parents who either love their children far too much or rue the day they were born: either one leads to the cruel undoing of their tone-deaf spawn on national television. They should have stuck to that Kardashian app.

Over on Channel 9, The Voice Kids was showing the same torturous consequences of parents spurring on their children, only here the kids hadn't had a chance to grow into deluded adults yet. It made me worry for a second that, were I to continue channel hopping, I'd discover every network was simply broadcasting the same people being rejected at varying stages of life.



Even the bizarre choice of song is mirrored by the tiny counterparts over on Channel 9. While Blurred Lines was bad enough from a grown man, you have to wonder about any parent that encourages their 11-year-old daughter to sing Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. The whole experience was very incongruous: like watching an all-child production of From Dusk Till Dawn.

If you don't enjoy using your television as a window to people's misfortunes, sadly the remote control offered little alternative as a means of escape on Sunday night. Unless you went completely mental and hit the "off" button.