The X-Factor returns to our screens tonight and, love it or hate it, tv betting fans will be glued to their tellies for the next three months or so struggling to anticipate how each public vote will go in their efforts to predict the almost unpredictable. It’s one thing weighing up talent and charisma as a measure of potential success of an act. It’s quite another when public sentiment is included in the equation. That’s why overweight people sometimes win.

Cool calculating industry eyes will be taking in the physical characteristics of the contenders almost as much as their musical skills. Elvis kicked it off but it took Prince to lay the matter bare, as it were, in the eighties when he took the wonder of sex and deployed it as a marketing tool as it had never been deployed before. Far from scandalising our famous British reserve we took to it like ducks to water. Sex sells and that’s that. Madonna and Kylie and all the rest of them have delivered it by the truckload ever since and we just can’t get enough.

So all you x-factor betting fans, when you’re glued to the show and arguing with your mates about who’s got the best voice or song, take a moment to check out the face, body and movement of the hopeful on the screen. The way they dress and the look in the eye. These things will tell you as much and maybe more about which one stands a chance in today’s pop jungle.