OK, my comment that race might be playing a part in people saying Alex and Leona are the same has clearly touched a nerve. I've been called racist myself for suggesting it, although I'm not sure exactly how that works.

Anyway, let me be very clear about what I meant.

I didn't, as one user asserted, "blindly suppose" anything. I suggested it MIGHT be an issue in SOME cases. And why? Well, as I said in the original post, I couldn’t see what else they have in common.

Undoubtedly some people will have spoken from a position of musical ignorance. If that's the case, then fair enough. Being tone deaf is nothing to be ashamed of any more than being dyslexic is.

But there was another issue I wasn’t taking into account. Jimmy The Fish commented, "It's not about colour it's about the genre. Do we need another note stretching, tonsil warbling, fist clenching, tear wrenching r 'n' b diva?"

Granted, this is a more persuasive argument. But hang on: this is X Factor we’re talking about! That is the genre it deals in. What sort of singer did you expect to win? Ian Curtis? Tom Waits? Bjork?

X Factor is based on a contemporary and restrictive definition of vocal talent called ‘melisma’. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion et al have a lot to answer for in establishing the false notion that a thousand notes are better than one. This has some worrying implications for popular music which have been discussed elsewhere on MSN Music. But I don’t make the rules. It’s what people buy by the bucketful and it’s what they vote for on X Factor.

If your gripe is that X Factor perpetuates the dominance of melismatic singing (ie. "we don’t need another singer who favours multiple tonal variations per syllable)", then I wholeheartedly agree - but that really is a different argument.

The fact remains that within the parameters of this dominant style, Alexandra and Leona are at different ends of the spectrum. In short, although the style in which they (and almost all their fellow X Factor contestants) sing is broadly similar, their voices don’t sound the same. Not even a bit.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have brought race into it at all. It’s a thorny subject at the best of times. I was simply expressing my exasperation at the numbers of people saying they sound the same when they quite clearly don’t. And that’s the last I’m saying on the matter.

Happy Christmas.

So the X Factor winner has claimed the Christmas number one for the fourth year in a row. No surprises there. And no surprises either that the choice of song, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, has provoked outrage among large numbers of 'serious' music fans.

I can sort of understand it. Hallelujah is a bleak, highly complex meditation on love, sex, spirituality, and transcendence. In other words, it's not a song for a 20 year-old TV talent show singer for whom the lyrics mean next to nothing.

It doesn't even suit her voice.

This isn't to be disrespectful to Alexandra Burke. She didn't choose to sing it and, frankly, nobody in their right mind would have picked it for her.

However, two very good things have come out of this one extremely poor decision.

As you may well have heard, a campaign to get the definitive Jeff Buckley version to number one might have failed (come on, that was never going to happen), but it has succeeded in getting it to number two.

Perhaps even more remarkably, the Leonard Cohen original has entered the lower reaches of the Top 40 as well.

Not only is this a small step for musical good taste, it's a giant leap for the spirit of Christmas.

How so? Well, as you may or may not be aware, old Leonard Cohen's been in dire need of a cash injection since suing his former manager for 'misappropriating' $5million from his retirement fund a few years ago.

Indeed, his acclaimed performance at this summer's Glastonbury only came about because he needed the money.

So, whatever you think of X Factor, Simon Cowell, Alexandra Burke, and all the rest of it, you can bet your life Leonard Cohen himself isn't complaining.

So I'm chatting to Michael Parkinson the other day (as you do), and he mentioned how lucky he felt to have been in his interviewing prime during the last era of truly great stars.

While I think Parky is correct up to a point, the X Factor final on Saturday proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that this generation has at least one star the equal of anyone who went before.

And I'm not talking about Eoghan.

I mean, seriously, just how good was Beyoncé? The woman not only looked and sounded immaculate, the humility and generosity of spirit which shone out of her put her in a different league altogether.

Was there any way Alexandra wasn't going to win after that duet? No disrespect to the lads from Boyzone and Westlife but Queen B has more star quality in her little finger than all of them put together.

I believe it's called the x factor.

Elsewhere in my conversation with Parky we got talking about the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand thing. I realise this is old news now but I think I've got a new angle, so bear with me.

Reading Parky's autobiography on the train to Windsor, I came across an amusing anecdote about when he first visited Australia in the early 1970s with Billy Connolly.

According to Parky, Australia was a much more conservative place in those days and the very sight of the Big Yin holding forth in canary yellow wellington boots and a pair of tights, all long hair and straggly beard, was enough to invite the attentions of the police on more than one occasion. 

As I was reading this, it suddenly occurred to me that Russell Brand has a similar effect on older people these days. I've written about this before but I've never known a personality divide people on generational lines like Brand. He's like kryptonite to the over-40s.

Parky wasn't particularly taken with my theory (which I wasn't surprised about) but I think he actually proved my point by repeatedly referring to the controversy as 'the Brand affair'.

I've noticed a tendency among older commentators to play down Jonathan Ross's part in the offending broadcast when anyone who ACTUALLY HEARD THE THING knows full well he was the ringleader and troublemaker-in-chief.

Why do they do it? Well, Ross has been around that bit longer for a start. He's pretty much establishment. And, a penchant for 'wacky' suits and smutty innuendo aside, he's actually a fairly conservative character at heart.

Russell Brand represents something altogether more threatening to certain sorts of people, much as Billy Connolly did back in the 1970s. Parky and others just can't see it through the rose-tinted spectacles of their nostalgia.

That Britney Spears, eh? We all thought she was done for at last year's MTV Awards. Overweight, out of time, miming all over the shop, it didn't look good. But there she was at the same event this year looking great.

True, she didn't perform, but it was enough to convince that the comeback was on.

All of which makes her appearance on last week's X Factor even more depressing.

If anything, her miming was even more obviously half-hearted than at the MTV debacle and, like Sarah Palin dressed as a slutty ringmaster, she seemed unable to answer even the most basic of questions.

Come on love, it was Dermot O'Leary not Jeremy Paxman.

Anyway, new single Circus is out soon and I've just been sent a still from the video. She looks good but I'm not sure how much is going on behind those eyes (well, eye).

Ah Britney. We'll miss her when she's gone.