14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, after the sing-off between Katie Waissel and Treyc Cohen, Cheryl Cole refused to vote, saying she didn’t want to send either girl home. Recently emerged details have prompted fans to call for her to be axed from her position as judge on the show.
Apparently, there was nothing spontaneous about her refusal to vote to keep either girl on the show since the entire bit had been rehearsed during a commercial break only minutes before, the Daily Mail has learned.
If she had voted, the situation would have probably come to deadlock, which means viewers’ votes would have decided who stayed and who went home.
Since Treyc reportedly had thrice the number of votes than Katie, it’s crystal clear she would have been the one to remain on the show. As such, fans want producers to let Cheryl go.
“Presenter Dermot O’Leary revealed that Cheryl Cole’s decision not to vote when two of her acts were up against each other to escape the axe had been planned all along,” the Mail writes.
In other words, it wasn’t a spontaneous thing but rather a deliberate one, meant to come up with a way to disregard the public votes and, this way, keep Katie on the show because she’s more bankable than Treyc.
“O’Leary revealed how Miss Cole’s apparently agonizing decision had actually been decided by show bosses during the commercial break – as more cynical viewers perhaps might have suspected all along,” the Mail writes.
“We thought it might happen before the break when we found out who was in the bottom two. We decided if she wasn’t going to vote, we would go to the majority verdict,” O’Leary is quoted as saying.
“The disclosure puts the episode in a disturbing new light and comes as calls are growing among fans for Miss Cole to be axed from her £1.7 million job,” the Mail further notes.
Countless viewers have taken to social networks to protest against Cole’s decision to abstain from voting, when it certainly put Katie at an unfair advantage.
Some have even gone to media watchdog Ofcom to complain officially. So far, their outraged cries have not had the expected result.