Nicole Scherzinger is right on the money. It is the era of the arse

"My ass wants to clap for you," says Nicole Scherzinger, a former Pussy Cat Doll (this is a real job), to Saara, an X-Factor contestant from Finland (this is a real country).

It’s an evocative phrase. I instantly picture the judges astride the table, their buttocks flapping grotesquely and thunderously like the tentacles of Cthulhu, as the Finnish lady’s face melts. “I don’t know where that [thought] came from,” Scherzinger wonders aloud of her own mind.

"It came from your heart," says the Finnish woman hopefully, and I know I'm back once more in the recurring cheese- dream that I call "millionaires mock the poor, consume their dreams and contractually enslave them for a generation" and others call X Factor (Saturday, Sunday, TV3).

As well as Nicole and the arse tentacles, there’s Sharon Osbourne, a woman who has seen so much horror that her face is now an immobilised mask, twinkly homunculus Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell himself, who is, as you know, a swarm of locusts inside a rubber man suit.

They all stand beneath, before and above their sigil, the X, patronising, bullying and mocking the poor and desperate who were left behind by free-market fundamentalism. The X in X Factor is basically the X in Brexit (if anyone wants to buy this headline for a "hot take", you can contact me at the usual email address).

Then I realise: I don't even know what sort of music industry these damned souls dream of becoming indentured to any more, so I flip over to MTV and watch this year's Video Music Awards (MTV, Monday) in order familiarise myself with the pop zeitgeist.

Scherzinger was on the money. It is the era of the arse. The arse is prominently featured in several dance routines and videos at this year’s VMAs. Okay, when Beyoncé’s dancing is arse-based, it’s in culturally aware quotation marks, but most of the others just go with a sort of devil-may-care arse-dancing joie-de-vivre. And when, later, Kanye leads the audience in a self-aggrandising round of applause for himself, I think he is savvy enough to know he’s being a bit of an arse, too. He is, to be sure, the arse that claps for itself.

Fishing enthusiast
But I'm jumping ahead. The evening begins with Rihanna in a T-shirt/corset combo and a pair of thigh-high pink wading wellies (is she a fishing enthusiast?) being accosted by dancers in onesies in what looks like an Ikea warehouse. "We found love in a hopeless place," she sings. It is an Ikea warehouse.

Her dancing at this point is very like a slowed down version of the Hucklebuck. She performs three more times during the evening. Each time she wriggles like a snake and waddles like a duck at different speeds and in different milieus.

Later, a delightful little fellow called Chance the Rapper bounds onstage wearing dungarees and a baseball hat with the number 3 on it in order to introduce high-pitched human/Theremin hybrid Ariana Grande, who sings her nifty hit Side to Side. She begins on an exercise bike before cavorting with some muscular gym bunnies and being joined by a sprechgesang-ing Nikki Minaj who is flanked by an honour guard of hunks. Grande yodels with joy at this development. Then two hunks simulate oral sex on Minaj and Grande because it's the goddamn 1990s. Well, it was when I last checked.

Nick Jonas broadcasts a bland song from a diner featuring loads of celebrities, because the second theme of the evening is “aren’t we all great”.

Then Alicia Keys has a show-stealing appearance in which she mentions Martin Luther King and reads/sings a poem about war and eroticism. It’s good and speaks to a third more fundamental theme of this year’s VMAs – pop music’s search for meaning.

This is there in Puff Daddy’s nods to the birth of hip-hop just down the road (they’re in New York) and in the comedians Key and Peele’s in-character lampooning of vacuous social-media influencers (“We live in a misogynist society and I’m not helping,” says Peele in an aside). And it’s sort of there in a rambling, possibly well-meaning, speech from Kanye West that tries to connect how amazing he is with a confusing message about being a “thought leader” and violence on the streets.

A fine line
Then he plays his new video in which a sweaty lady (artist and actress Teyana Taylor) does sexy dancing and sexy showering for several minutes before, for no reason, appearing with a cat's face and a hunk and a baby in a roomful of sheep, and we are reminded, once more, that the universe is empty and God is dead (the song and video are still works of genius – the fine line between clever and stupid is where Kanye lives).

But pop music's search for meaning reaches its apotheosis with Queen Bey, who out-sings, out-song-writes, out-dances and out-spectacles everyone with a 16-minute performance of the best tracks from Lemonade in which, dressed as a sort of timelord, she sets out to batter the status quo and at least one camera lens with political awareness and personal confessionals and a baseball bat. She even arrived to the venue with the mothers of four black men murdered in racially charged incidents. She is amazing.

Poor Britney Spears has to follow this. When she appears after the ad break with her flat-cap and banjo to perform her hit, When I'm Cleaning Windows, she seems like something from another era.

So, now fully informed about the state of pop, I go back to X-Factor, where the judges are reducing a bereaved, single mum to tears (Sharon Osbourne cries too, but it may have been just one of her seams bursting). "I like you," say the locusts who operate Simon's man suit (they require the salt from human tears to nourish their larvae) and suddenly I feel empty inside. If a protest-singer falls in a forest does anyone hear? What is the sound of one buttock clapping?

What is love?
The brilliant Robot Wars (Sunday, BBC2) features home-made death robots, created by delightful hobbyists, that buzzsaw, hack and gouge one another in a booby-trapped fighting arena. The new season, which just finished, was overseen by two perfectly cast Irish presenters, Angela Scanlon and Dara Ó Briain, and some charismatic house-robots (Sir Killalot should get his own chat show) and the programme will continue until the moment a robot trains a beady sensor on its creator and asks: "What is love?"

At which point, of course, we’re all f**ked. Our surviving ancestors, cowering in tunnels beneath the ruins of our civilization will ask “Why the hell did they give them weapons?” and “What was ‘Kanye West’?”