But it couldn’t. After the 2010 high, Simon, Cheryl and Dannii all left, to be replaced by human storm cloud Gary Barlow. During the misery of the Barlow years, X Factor stopped being cool again. I’d text my old X Factor buddies with hilarious jokes I’d been crafting about Sam Bailey (looks like Katy B from the future) and Luke Friend (proof that a wood-beaded necklace is the most effective woman repellant you can own without a UN Security Council resolution) and they’d reply saying: “WHOOOO?”

Now The X Factor is in terminal decline, Simon and Cheryl are back but ratings are so low that not only is it being trounced by Strictly, even Antiques Roadshow is getting more viewers on a Sunday. Twitter on a Saturday night is a barren wasteland of drunk football fans and Buzzfeed scheduled posts. The show itself is showing its desperation to hold onto viewers, changing the presenters, stealing Rita Ora from The Voice, diddling the format in bizarre and pointless ways (worst of all were the “live judges houses” episodes in which the contestants were filmed live in a TV studio watching footage of them performing months earlier). The whole thing is a shitshow to be quite honest, and yet I can’t stop watching.

I think I love it now, in the same way a small child loves watching Toy Story on VHS a hundred times in a row. The things that upset people about it – big parts of the show are staged, the same kind of contestants audition every year, it’s easy to predict what’s going to happen – I find comforting. I know I’m being manipulated and I don’t care.

I have a friend who creates shiny-floor TV formats like the X Factor and when we’re drunk in the pub we always pitch ideas for formats to him. “What if 10 Clowns learn to play the violin”, “What about a show that’s like Bake Off but for chemical engineers” – great ideas like that. He always says the same thing: It’s a nice idea but there aren’t that many things you can learn to do in 10 weeks, start off ok and get noticeably better at, that’s why so many shows are variations on the same thing.”

But becoming a popstar is one of those things. Watching that process to me is still magical. Because when you strip everything else away, The X Factor is in fact immensely real. It turns ordinary people, however briefly, into nationally recognised stars. And that fairytale process, and the nightmarish fallout from it, is endlessly interesting to me.