Does BWG Have the X Factor?

Among all the stage-managed spats and carefully rehearsed raillery that constitute ITV's megahit, The X Factor, it takes just one ostensibly genuine comment to escape from a judge's lips to stand out like a Hong Kong motorcyclist who doesn't overtake on the double white lines between the two lanes of traffic at the entrance to the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.

The comment came from Cheryl Cole, the girl-group gyrator and one time England football team WAG, who casts a shadow so long that she forced fellow female panellist Dannii Minogue, who has a time-share on the family brain cell with big sister Kylie, into the list of ten people most admired by the British middle class, my compatriots thereby proving once for all that being talentless, stupid, nasty and overpaid is okay just so long as you're also an underdog.

Cheryl's post-divorce hemlines have been getting so high that it came as no surprise when she chose to lip-synch her latest hit on Sunday's programme in a high crotched swimsuit. The pint-sized mimer told one of the acts they should consider a career in children's television, where, if we are lucky, they would be joined by Louis Walsh, the hapless Irishman whose day job is to manage Westlife. Louis's sole contribution to the show is to lean forward in his chair, gesticulate with his biro and say "One hundred and ten per cent, yes!", while the audience does the sensible thing and drowns him out until it's Cheryl's turn.

Talking of children's shows, there used to be one in Britain called Play School, where the presenters would take schoolkids, though not literally, of course – those were more innocent days – through windows of various shapes: the round, the square, and – on very special days – the arched.

Reading Big White Guy gives me that type of through-the-arched-door feeling. From the glowing references from readers ("... count me in as a member of the world wide BWG fan club", "it's a pleasure to read your perspective on life ... I get a good laugh out of many of your articles" [a little ambivalent, that one], "unlike other bloggers, you don't brag that you know everything about Hong Kong" [ditto]), which sound as if they might have been composed by one of Simon Cowell's focus groups, through the "tales" with their faintly disturbing passive-aggressive air, to the extraordinary Mabelisms, a series of transcripts of sub-mundane conversations with his wife that may yet provoke Hong Kongers into coining a Cantonese word for "condescending", to visit Randall J. van der Woning's world is to give a vigorous workout to your willing suspension of disbelief.

One of Randall's recent posts is a variation on a theme that is for many people synonymous with the Canadian: scams. Whether it's dodgy types sticking flags on you on a Saturday morning outside the MTR, or conmen pretending to be beggars – the theme of an earlier post – it's all of a piece to the "BWG", who secured himself a place in cyber history with his ardent advocacy of a beautiful blonde cancer patient that turned out to be the invention of a Kansan housewife with an overactive imagination.

Now, I ask you, can you imagine anyone more improbably named than Kaycee Nicole Swenson? Dannii Minogue excepted, of course ...