Would Dannii tear Cheryl's hair out? Would the spirit of Mrs O - Sharon Osbourne, erratic, water-throwing queen of The X Factor - hang over proceedings, after leaving the show over rumoured friction with Dannii Minogue and a row about money? Would the contestants be the usual mix of grotesques and the gifted, with most time going to the grotesques? The show typically ends the week before Christmas, just in time for the winner's single to become the seasonal No 1. Can this mean this series of The X Factor will last for over a third of the year? The answers: no, no, yes and yes.

Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud is Osbourne's replacement. The only sign of competitiveness between her and Minogue so far has been the size of their handbags. What do they put in these shoulder-weakening sacks? Cole took part in Popstars: The Rivals six years ago and said she knew how the contestants were feeling. It's brave and odd for her to flirt with the format again.

The judges, in brashly ungreen limos and helicopters, started in Manchester. A duo who sounded like two cats having vigorous sex down an alley were rightly savaged. At the O2 Arena in London a genuinely promising boyband won the judges over. In the holding area a team of researchers was amassing the worst hard-luck stories: “You lost your family in a plane crash, then your dog died of kidney failure? That's so last season.” They found Rachel, a 26-year-old single mother of five children, who'd done drugs and gone to jail and wanted “a better life”. Through misty eyes the judges waved her on to “boot camp”, where Simon Cowell will hopefully be aided by Sinitta and her amazing hair.

In Cardiff a 16-year-old from Bridgend claimed, inappropriately, that success would mean people wouldn't associate Bridgend with teen suicide. The most excruciating moment came when Cole was faced with a fellow contestant from Rivals. Nick is now a singer on the working men's club circuit; their career paths painfully divergent. His audition was colourless. Cole, squirming, sloped off. The other judges rejected him. “It's time to stop chasing this dream,” Cowell said. A teary Cole was beginning to twig the circus horribilis nature of the show, the consequences of a “yes” or “no”. Drama, meltdowns, shameless viewer manipulation and the battle of the handbags: the four months will fly by.

In The Perfect Vagina, Lisa Rogers wanted women to feel OK about the look of their labias. The number of women having operations to excise the flappiness of their “bits” (as Rogers referred to them) is increasing. Rogers saw it as unnecessary butchery and joined a group of women observing their vaginas in a mirror. The surgery looked painful, but there was no compelling feminist argument: is porn, aimed at men, really encouraging women to change the look of their vaginas, as Rogers claimed?

“It doesn't matter what your vagina looks like. Love the fact,” she concluded weakly. It simply came down to being willing to pay for looking different. Sometimes hippy-dippy self-empowerment can't help us - sad but true - and if you've got the money... If Rogers was so proud of how normal her labia (which she called “Yoni”, I think) looked, why didn't she follow the example of many in the programme and show it to the world?

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