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BT Tower falls over, crushes X Factor hopefuls

Simon Cowell's monster downed in giant pussy* attack?

BT's iconic central London tower flipped out on Saturday evening, delaying transmission of an episode of The X Factor for 15 minutes.

The delay to the start of Saturday night talent-show-cum-hard-luck-story-cringefest sparked a cascade of conspiracy theories, as concerned fans stayed on their arses to bombard Twitter and Facebook.

Purported reasons for the delay ranged from some sort of voting fix to the almost plausible theft of copper cable, to the even more plausible Kelly and Louis turning up in the same outfit. No one appeared to posit the possibility of an outbreak of self-awareness and taste amongst the contestants.

In the end, you'll no doubt be fascinated to know that wannabe star Kitty was voted off on Sunday after her performance on Saturday's delayed show.

In a statement on The X Factor website, an ITV spokesperson said: "The problem which was caused by a power failure at BT Tower, and was outside of ITV and the producers' control, was resolved as quickly as possible. We apologise for the disruption to programming."

According to The Telegraph, the tower is used to relay the show live – at least as live as the walkie-talkie droids can be – from its studios in Wembley to the rest of a waiting nation.

The paper said a whole floor of the building had been "knocked out by the surge".

BT confirmed: "There was an unusual power spike on Saturday evening which disrupted services from the BT Tower for a short time. We are looking into the circumstances behind the outage." BT's erection is essentially a video switching centre, providing TV distribution for most of the UK’s multiplexes.

While the tower is still festooned with radio masts and dishes, most of these are effectively redundant, and as far as many are concerned the building is effectively useless as a communications centre.

The fact that it is central to bringing The X Factor to the nation only proves this point. ®

* For the young'uns.

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