Once upon a time many years ago when I was a trainee reporter in Manchester I suffered a deeply humiliating experience. I auditioned for Blind Date.

It was, as you’d expect, a befouling ordeal. But as it was an “undercover” job and they didn’t know I was a journalist I had to pretend in my best “whooowoooo!” voice that I really was the sort of person who’d sit there in a short PVC dress and say: “If I was a vegetable I’d be a tomato because I’m FIRM, I’m SWEET and if you PICK me things will get SAUCY!!!” Translation: “I’m so desperate to go on that tacky holiday and buy another week on telly that I’ll promise a stranger sex in front of ten million viewers even though he’s hidden behind a screen and may have a face like a melted bucket.”

Anyway, I was rubbish and they rejected me partly because, in a moment of panicked unprofessionalism, I admitted that I had a boyfriend, which broke Cilla’s rules. But I did learn something that day. I realised that making it through the auditions of any primetime TV show is hardcore stuff. To withstand the queueing, the waiting around with the sort of egos you’d pay to avoid in normal life and the nerve-racking performances in front of regional adjudicators who look so bored you wonder if they’ve had a stroke, you have to be focused, tenacious, self-believing. You have to really want it (“whoooo!”).

So my sympathies are with Simon Cowell, who this week defended himself against criticism that shows such as Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor “exploit” contestants and milk their personal sob stories, promising them the Moon then, when the cameras stop rolling, walk away, leaving them to a terrible fate performing at social clubs in Dudley. From the way some of the contestants moan, said Cowell, “you would think they had been locked up and tortured or taken into a room to have a personal confession beaten out of them, instead of voluntarily taking part in a televised talent show”.

Hallelujah, Simon of the Brite Smile. That’s putting it mildly. Some of these are people so ravenous for a break they’d scale an Everest of dung and sell their granny’s kidneys on eBay if it meant getting to No 1. Yet the same people will come over all ingénue the moment it transpires that they’ve either lost or aren’t going to be the new Will Young after all.

Fabulously, Steve Brookstein, who won the first X Factor in 2004 but was later dropped like a hot brick by his record label, is now writing a tell-all book about the show. Its working title is Getting Over the X (after chick-lit and mis-lit can we now say hello to an exciting new genre, bit-lit, the memoirs of the bitter?) in which he’ll interview others such as Leon Jackson and Michelle McManus, who didn’t quite, ahem, fulfil their potential. Brookstein has urged people not to waste their money by ringing in to vote on The X Factor, as 5.5 million viewers did for him. “It is a form of bear-baiting,” he said.

Course it is, Steve. Except that no one can actually recall the bit when you were chained against your will with wild dogs tearing lumps out of your throat. Instead we remember stylists, backing choirs, dry ice and you working overtime to secure Simon Cowell’s £1 million contract.

But then this is a blame culture and just as the pedestrian who trips over and breaks his leg blames the local council and not his gormless self for not looking where he was going, so the game show contestant who flops blames Simon Cowell and not himself for simply not having what it takes to make it big.

If a man can sue the makers of Bud Light because the beverage didn’t give him access to beautiful women as the advert had led him to believe (the case was dismissed) then it’s a logical next step for contestants to sue TV producers for the mental anguish they suffered believing that they were destined for the O2 Arena, but actually ended up at Butlins.

The X Factor auditions taking place now are even tougher. They are held in front of a baying audience rather than in a private room. Ambulance-chasing lawyers are probably circling the building right now.

But I don’t even believe Cowell should be pilloried over Susan Boyle’s meltdown or those children bursting into tears during Britain’s Got Talent. True, it was disturbing watching Aidan Davis, 11, cry under Cowell’s mean criticism and Hollie Steel, 10, weep like an orphaned calf after she dried up during her song. But behind every child is a parent waiting beadily in the wings. If it’s anyone’s responsibility to say “this has gone too far”, surely it’s them? Yet did you notice a single parent dragging their kid off that stage?

Susan Boyle is said to have mild learning difficulties but she can vote, she runs her own home and she chose to take part in a show that she had seen before, knowing how it worked. None of her family seemed to have a problem with that at the time.

It was discomfiting when she broke down before a show in Liverpool, sobbing for her cat, but if the show’s producers had stepped in months ago and barred her from competing, what’s the betting someone would have popped up complaining about “equal opportunities”? The main problem for Susan Boyle seems to be that she didn’t win.

None of these shows is massively different in format to New Faces and Opportunity Knocks in the Seventies, but no contestant then would have dreamt of running to the press complaining about Clifford Davis or Tony Hatch. Lena Zavaroni never, to my knowledge, blamed her personal troubles on Hughie Green. The truth is that showbiz is one of the vilest industries there is, and winning a talent show doesn’t necessarily make you a star.

If you can’t accept that it’s often cruel, degrading and that you may make a complete tit of yourself, then take it from one who knows. Save yourself: don’t enter.

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