LIke everyone else, I watch the first few episodes of X Factor just to see the idiots. But they let far too many talented people through for me. I’d sooner they reversed it and just whittled people out: ‘No, sorry, you’re too good at singing, you’re out.’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘London.’ ‘Oh, no, you’re out.’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Leeds.’ ‘No, sorry, you’re out.’ ‘Where you from?’ ‘Narnia!’ ‘Great, you’re in!’ They’re the people I want to see on telly. That’s a better show for me. It’d be great TV and the winner would get some sort of hospital care and then just put on a cruise.

But it’s mental. I’ve been for auditions for parts in plays and TV shows, and obviously they don’t make an immediate choice when you’re there, but at no point do I do it and afterwards go, ‘Please, let me do it again, give me one more chance!’ I don’t get my mum in to defend me: ‘Oh let him, he’s been trying so hard.’ It does my head in. I mean, have
a bit of decorum.

The other big thing is the judges. I don’t mind Cowell. He basically says what we’d like to say. But Dannii Minogue? She can’t have been their first choice, can she? She’s not even first choice in that family. But Britain’s Got Talent is the one that gets me the most. Are you sure we’ve got talent? Because one of them was a dog. A bloody dancing dog! That doesn’t count, does it? I mean, if we start putting dogs in things, we’d piss the Olympics wouldn’t we? Put one of them in the 100 metres race. Exactly.

Simon Cowell, we love to hate, he’s a kind of pantomime character, but it’s the other two judges that really get me  – Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan. They’re not even the most talented in their field! They call them ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’ I call them ‘The Good, the Bad and the Massive Prick.’ And Holden – she’s not even a good actress. I saw Robert De Niro in The Actor’s Studio on the Biography Channel the other week and he didn’t mention her once. He didn’t go, ‘You
know what? It’s all about Holden for me. I saw her in The Grimleys and thought about knocking acting on the head.’   

For full details and dates of Jason’s current UK tour, go to www.jasonmanford.com