Ah, American Idol Disco Night – a tradition right up there with visiting elderly relatives and hereditary bowel disease.

Honestly, why? Whose idea is it to keep bringing Disco Night back to American Idol? If it isn’t someone who has a financial interest in those cross-channel ferries than run a nightclub service to Calais every month with music by a middle-aged local radio DJ then we’ll be surprised. American Idol Disco Night is terrible.

So what happened on last night’s American Idol? Some people with funny haircuts sang some uninteresting disco songs in a mediocre way. Don’t you watch American Idol?

Because each season of American Idol lasts roughly – and this is just a ballpark here – 400 years, it doesn’t take much for the show to look stale. And, for all sorts of reasons, that’s exactly what happened on last night’s American Idol. Here’s why…

1 – It was Disco Night on American Idol last night. Disco Night, for crying out loud. There are only two places where disco music – or at least the disco music chosen by the American Idol contestants – should be heard. Wedding receptions and hell. Provided that wedding receptions aren’t automatically a direct subcategory of hell, of course. And we need hard proof that they aren’t. In summary, disco music makes us want to kill ourselves.

2 – In terms of the zeitgeist, American Idol has been blown clean out of the water this week by Britain’s Got Talent and, specifically, Susan Boyle. Nobody wants to see pretty young starlets wiggle and writhe through zippy performances any more – they only like hearing depressing songs performed by dumpy little sasquatches who look like they pick their dinner out of their hair every evening. Plus, screw you Danny Gokey. You’ve got a dead wife? So what? Susan Boyle has got fairly big eyebrows. That’s tragedy.

3 - This far into American Idol, we can start to see through each contestant’s palette of tricks and gimmicks. So when Adam Lambert slowed down If I Can’t Have You enough to let him pull an array of faces that made it look like he was being sucked off by something startling like a dinosaur or his grandmother, it wasn’t a surprise. That’s what Adam Lambert does every single week on American Idol. Similarly, when Lil Rounds was rubbish and a bit embarrassing to watch during her performance of I’m Every Woman, that wasn’t a surprise for exactly the same reason.

In fact, the most interesting thing we can honestly say about last night’s American Idol is that Anoop Desai didn’t shave beforehand – something that Paula Abdul singled out as an example of his artistic growth. We haven’t shaved for over a week. We think that makes us Ernest Hemingway. Thanks, Paula!

But still, because Matt Giraud inexplicably got saved from elimination on last week’s American Idol, two performers have to get the shove tonight, and that has to be a good thing. Or is it? We’ve just realised that we’ll get two goodbye performances instead of one this week. And they’ll both be disco songs. Arses.

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