William Diffin
The Y?-Factor
Scene: suburban living room. Young woman is dancing like an
idiot with her Atari 600 or whatever in front of a plasma
screen. Beyoncé Knowles on the stereo. Some of the girl's
dance moves are almost skilfully choreographed, but her
timing and execution are so inept that she appears wildly
funny. Her bouncing breasts keep threatening to fall out of
her rising boob tube, which she repeatedly pulls down.
Scene: An acne-scarred adolescent in his bedsit is playing
the trumpet, Jeepers Creepers. He keeps missing the note and
his timing is slightly off.
Scene: A University campus bar. An excruciating adolescent
with a goatee and beret is reading his poetry to his
increasingly restless girlfriend in a corner. She
accidentally knocks her wine glass into his lap to make him
stop.
Scene: Large middle-aged woman in her bathtub, singing
numbers from The Sound of Music, in a thick Scottish accent.
'Hoe d'ye sorlve a prorblem lik Mar-i-a? Hoe d'ye tek a
cloon an pin er doon?'
Scene: Black kid in school uniform rapping in front of a
full-length mirror in his suburban bedroom. With wild
spastic hand gestures, grabbing angrily at his crotch
betimes. 'Eenie meenie minie moe, I know where I want to go,
I'm havin me own TV show... innit.'
Scene: The roller-skating rink. This tall thin guy in sky
blue bell bottoms is listening to Ravel's Boléro on his
Walkman gadget thing as he tries to look balletic. Close-up
of the guy's face whizzing past looking confident with
Boléro cascading away. Cut to the wide angle shot of the
whole rink, with Boléro silenced and only the sounds of the
rink and the other skaters. The guy turns round and rolls
backwards into somebody and they go sprawling.
Scene: Some clean-cut kid in his bedroom screeching the
lyrics to Everybody Hurts at unfeasibly high volume. His
mother calls him: 'Jason, come downstairs, there's a letter
from the BBC come for you!' Jason shuts up and immediately
bounds down the stairs into the suburban hall, where his
mother hands him a letter. He feverishly opens it, and reads
intently for a while. 'This is it mum!' he exclaims. 'I've
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William Diffin
been accepted to appear on the Y-Factor! I'm going to be on
telly!' They embrace. Cut.
Scene: BBC Television studios. Jason is at reception with
his letter. 'I'm here for the Y-Factor,' he announces. The
receptionist directs him to take a lift up to the top floor,
and follow a complicated set of directions navigating some
corridors, to reach a door. He's told to walk right in
through the door when he gets there. Jason gets into the
lift. He waits for the lift to ascend. He gets out of the
lift and sees a sign on a pole atop a circular floor stand,
directing him: 'Y-Factor THIS WAY→'. There is no one about.
He follows the directions, looking around him, not seeing
another soul. Finally he gets to a long corridor that
terminates in a door with a sign on it, which can't be made
out at the distance. He hurries along the corridor. Finally
the sign appears large enough to see. It's the sort of hand-
drawn sign that might advertise a student review or a bingo
night, day-glo orange with hacking showbiz capital lettering
in black marker pen, surrounded by pentacles: 'THE Y -
FACTOR'. Jason reaches the door and knocks. No answer. He
opens the door and walks in, closing the door behind him,
the camera does not follow him in, and all that is seen of
the interior of the room is featureless white. Cut to
external shot of the building from elevation. There is a
loud crackling electric buzz sound, exactly like the sound
of an electric insect killer, and a window on the top floor
of the building briefly flickers an intense bright electric
blue. A brief puff of white steam emerges from a small
right-angled chimney sticking out of the side of the
building above the window. Camera pans down to a bird's-eye
view of the entrance to the building, Tarkovsky-style. There
is a long line of people waiting to be allowed entrance.
Camera follows them. There's one girl dressed in a black
leotard like Beyoncé. Another kid has a trumpet, there's a
guy in a beret, a fat lady, somebody else is spazzing and
talking to himself in rhyme, and then there's the guy on
roller skates. Camera pans along a long line of other
mentally-ill people, all suffering different variations of
the same incogitative delusion that the Muse has visited
each of them in some way. Some of the variations are quite
disturbing. A ginger-haired boy who plays the spoons, a guy
in a Roy Rogers outfit, several Marilyn Monroe
impersonators, a Cilla Black impersonator, an Isla St. Clair
impersonator, some old guy with ten Rubik's Cubes trapped in
his waist-long beard, a boy scouts production of The Rocky
Horror Picture Show, someone practising their Michael
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William Diffin
Jackson moonwalk, ten ventriloquists, etc. etc. etc. The
loud electric buzzing sound is heard again. Cut to black.
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