Oh my god. How could the aus idol grand final have taken three frigging hours? It's a 30 second announcement. If you add in 4 and a half minutes of the winner actually singing the song that they're releasing, then it shouldn't take more than five minutes in total. Hell, you could squeeze it in between programs like they do with the winning lotto numbers. It was bad enough that each Monday's verdict took an hour for them to say which poor sod had been kicked out. But three whole hours? The mind boggles.

With all the advertising channel 10 puts in, they make it sound like the Australian idol announcement is the most important thing to happen all year. Notice that they pulled out all the stops: they had a red carpet for the finalists to walk up (from their convertible, that is), and they brought on a massive amount of fireworks just to show how special the occasion is. It's a competition, people. Not the freedom of slaves from oppression. Nor even a religious occasion. It's a frigging overhyped overproduced competition where the producers probably pull eachother off based on just how many ad breaks they can squeeze in between the start of the show and the actual point of the show.

The frightening thing, however, was the crowd outside the opera house. All those people must have queued up for hours waiting to get in. To stand around a see a couple weirdos performing. They didn't even get to see the winner performing live, it would have been shown on the screen. What a waste of time. I can only imagine what tiny proportion of the time they were actually being entertained.

That's if they were entertained by the likes of Flynn and Marcia hines singing songs that should never have been exposed to air. What the hell was Flynn trying to do? That wasn't music. It vaguely reminded me of this. Yes, that's right, it's a song using the words of the psycho from Silence of the Lambs. Except that the Silence of the Lambs thing was actually half decent. Flynn's thing reminded me of the repetitive mindless words and demented musical sounds. But where the SotL song uses them to produce decent creepy effect, the only effect Flynn's song had on me was switching channels.

If all that wasn't bad enough, then they couldn't even finish the show on time. It was meant to finish at 10, so if you tried tuning in for the last few minutes just to see the verdict itself, then you were stuck waiting for another half-hour.

I'd be grateful that it's finally over... except, well, this is coming. And then this. And then another one of these. And then aus idol will start all over again. And then again we will be subjected to week after week of being told to vote. To spend my hard-earned money on something as pointless as someone else's position in a singing competition. I can't believe people actually invest in this. Every week. For months on end. Surely the money could be better spent.

There are some evil money-sucking producers out there who have made a tonne of money, I expect. Because they've manipulated the idiotic population into giving up their money. I suppose that's the whole point of marketing, but if a whole generation of young girls can be manipulated that easily then Australia is really going downhill. As if the election results weren't bad enough already. I'm surrounded by morons!