If a quarter of a century of reality TV talent shows has taught us anything, it’s that success in them is seldom a guarantee of lasting fame: more often than not, the celebrity is fleeting, and confined to the country of the show’s origin.
You might have predicted that outcome for One Direction. Simon Cowell claimed to have thrown the band together “in 10 minutes” from solo contestants who had failed to progress any further than the bootcamp stage of the 2010 UK X Factor – despite the fact that one of them, the Wolverhampton-born Liam Payne, had at one stage been tipped to win the series for his initial audition: a version of Cry Me a River. One Direction ended the series in third place, and that, you could have assumed, was that – after all, the stock of the boyband was hopelessly low at the time.
