Rethink Mental Illness says Ceri Rees is vulnerable
By Ian Birch
The mental health charity Rethink has joined critics of ITV's X Factor, and accused the show's producers of exploiting 54 year old Ceri Rees, from Bridgend in South Wales, after featuring the tone-deaf singer, in her fourth series, at the weekend.
Producers devoted no fewer than 7.5 minutes of prime time TV to the vulnerable adult, who would have had to get through four rounds of pre-auditions each time before being televised.
Is it time we all boycotted the X Factor? I have personally never watched anything other than the live finals, and was highly distressed watching Ceri Rees on YouTube - a link to which we won't be posting in order to spare her further humiliation.
According to the Daily Mail, Ceri was befriended by a singing tutor a couple of years ago -- as an act of friendship and compassion, not exploitation -- and researchers at the X Factor had made a half-hour aggressive and intimidating phone call to her singing tutor and friend when she objected to Ceri being featured in this year's show.
Ceri had had a bit of a makeover with shorter, lighter hair and a set of dentures and is clearly extremely vulnerable. I wouldn't like to speculate as to whether she has a mental health problem, and as Rethink told me, it's important that people with mental health difficulties are able to participate fully in TV and radio when they are well enough to do so.
But this was pure and simple gratuitous exploitation and there can be no excuses for this -- 11 million viewers tuned in, in the UK alone, to watch Ceri's "performance" at the weekend.
Mark Davies, Director of Communications at Rethink Mental Illness said: “While we can’t speculate on the state of Ceri’s mental health, she does appear vulnerable and it was clear she had been set up to fail.
“With the right support, there is no reason why people with mental health problems shouldn’t be allowed to appear on shows like this – after all some of our most talented stars have been affected by mental health problems, such as Robbie Williams and Catherine Zeta Jones.
“However, if someone appears vulnerable as Ceri did, to put them in the spotlight in this context is exploitative. We hope the public outcry over this incident will prompt X Factor bosses to be more sensitive in the way they handle similar contestants in future.
“Regardless of mental health issues, I think most people watching would have regarded this episode as gratuitous and cruel.”
An AOL Celebrity poll last night showed that 60.4% of the public agreed with Rethink that Ceri was exploited by Simon Cowell's producers. This is a very high figure for a self-selecting internet poll and shows the depth of public revulsion at Ceri's exploitation on primetime ITV1.
I hope that by journalists like me piling pressure on TV bosses that they will one day alter the format of X Factor so that only contestants with a genuine possbility of reaching the live finals will be featured on TV. I have a mentally ill friend who reached bootcamp and whilst he told me his story in confidence and I can't repeat it here, it was certainly an eye-opener. So for me this is personal. There are reports today that Ceri has left her flat and gone into hiding to avoid the media - she is so embarrassed.
Simon Cowell - it's time for your personal intervention or maybe it's time we "called time" on the hit TV format?
