The X Factor is coming to an end. It s time to look back on 100 years of this talent show, and to celebrate its landmark moments.
1921: The very first X Factor opens at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse. Under its original title The Xylophone Factor, it features 50 different xylophonists performing popular numbers of the day.
The winner is the morbidly obese Mandy Lifeboat, with her rendition of I m Forever Blowing Bubbles.
1926: Novelist Virginia Woolf joins top comic Charlie Chaplin and leading American entrepreneur Al Capone on the panel of the X Factor
Interviewed just before she takes to the stage, she reveals that she has just suffered a bout of hay fever, she wants to follow her dream, her nan has just been run over and her beloved budgerigar has a sore left foot.
Of all the places Boris Johnson could have picked – and he had the whole of Britain’s hospitality sector on bended knee before him – the PM has certainly made an unusual choice.
Handed the rotating presidency of the G7 Summit of the world’s leading economies, he decided that the best place to hold their first summit after the longest hiatus since the Cold War should be here – in a glorified country pub at the end of a tiny cul-de-sac, wedged between a railway line and the beach where the Slater family from Essex are currently building sandcastles.
Make no mistake, the event which is about to unfold here in Cornwall’s Carbis Bay, next door to the artistic fishing town of St Ives, is a proper summit. More than 6,000 police and thousands of troops are currently taking up residence in the fields hereabouts (they even have their own pop-up Tesco).