And lo, there was an entirely predictable number one single.  The 2011 series of X Factor is over, and the triumphant winners are Little Mix, who receive the dubious reward of recording a cover version of “Cannonball”.

As I write this, they haven’t released the official video – though it’s a fairly safe bet that it will be a mixture of audition footage, the band standing in a studio in front of a back-projected screen of moving landscapes, and a pause just before the rousing key change to insert their victory announcement.

In the meantime, here they are on the final.

It is, of course, not very good.  But X Factor winner singles never are, and generally bear no resemblance to anything subsequently released by the artist.  I suspect Little Mix will actually end up making records that sound a bit like the Saturdays.

Little Mix are the first group to win X Factor.  JLS came very close and have had a better career than most of the winners.  But until now, girl groups have made no impact on the show at all, routinely getting booted out by the (mostly female) voters in the first two weeks.  Little Mix have the additional disadvantage of being one of the groups assembled from offcuts in the audition stages; of those, only One Direction have got anywhere.

The problem with the X Factor format is that, while allowing groups to enter sounds very nice, it’s proved to be much harder to fill that category with viable contenders, leaving it as a sort of dead zone to pad out the early rounds.  And in a format that favours acts with a “story”, it’s harder for randomly assembled groups to make an impact.  Ironically, that may have worked in Little Mix’s favour, since their trend-bucking performance then became their arc.  Still, you have to wonder whether the producers have now started deliberately rejecting viable candidates simply so that they can be used to fill out the group category.

Little Mix are Jessy Nelson, Jade Thirlwall, Perrie Edwards and Leigh-Anne Pinnock.  They were originally called Rhythmix, but the charity of the same name weren’t best pleased by that (particularly when Simon Cowell tried to trademark the name), and after they wisely took their objections to the newspapers, Cowell backed down.  The group were hastily renamed Little Mix, and it’ll be interesting to see whether somebody now takes the opportunity to pause, reflect, and come up with something better.

I think it’s supposed to be a pun on “Little Miss”.  It’s hard to tell.

As I’ve noted before, viewing figures are down this year, and there’s a general consensus that this has not been a classic year for contestants.  Of last year’s crop, four acts have gone on to some degree of success: Matt Cardle, Rebecca Ferguson, One Direction, and Cher Lloyd.  It’s hard to imagine that being repeated with this year’s bunch.

It’s also true that this is the lowest-selling winner’s single since Steve Brookstein back in season 1 – though 210,000 still makes it a big seller by normal standards.  In fact, Matt Cardle’s single last year sold more than twice as much.  Then again, Little Mix are also the first winner not to release their single in the week of the Christmas chart itself, and it’s always possible that’s having an impact too.

At any rate, given the right material, Little Mix are probably a workable act in the real world, bearing in mind that their only real competition is the Saturdays.  What really matters for the winner’s future career is how many regular record buyers are behind them, not how popular they are with the X Factor viewers who buy one single a year.  After all, the highest ever first week sales for an X Factor winner were achieved by Shayne Ward.  It’s not like there’s a clear correlation with later success.

Damien Rice’s original version of “Cannonball” reached number 32 on its first release in 2003, number 19 on re-issue the next year, and number 9 in September after it was used in the X Factor audition shows.  As is now traditional, it re-enters this week at number 19.

I like to imagine that somewhere out there, in an alternate universe, there’s been a terrible clerical error, and Little Mix ended up covering the Breeders song instead.

Oh, and because Little Mix reprised their version on the final, “Don’t Let Go” by En Vogue also re-enters at number 27.

You might assume that nobody major act in their right mind would release a single to compete with the X Factor winner.  Strangely, you’d be wrong – one act has done so, and even more bizarrely, she’s also signed to Simon Cowell.  Then again, the release schedule is hardly the oddest thing about this record.

Yes, Leona Lewis really has re-tooled “Hurt” for primetime ITV.  And it’s at number 8, after she performed it on the X Factor finals.  (It was number 3 in the midweeks, so sales really must have tailed off.)  Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a video for it, even though it is her current single.

The original version is by Nine Inch Nails, from their 1994 album “The Downward Spiral”, and while it was always one of their more sensitive and tuneful numbers, it’s still some way from Simon Cowell’s usual source material.  It reached a somewhat broader audience (such as the people who choose Leona Lewis singles) in 2002 when Johnny Cash recorded it – though these things are relative, as it peaked at number 39.  It’s an inspired choice of cover, since the lyrics are perfectly suited to the epitaph of a dying star.  The video, filmed when Cash was 71 years old and in the last year of his life, is rightly regarded as a classic.

It’s difficult to imagine why anyone would go near the song again after that.  But then, if Simon Cowell figures his core audience probably haven’t seen either of the earlier versions, he might well be right.

From the sublime to the… not so sublime.  Rizzle Kicks are gearing up to release “Mama Do The Hump” as a single after Christmas, and since it’s already available as an album track, people have stared buying it.  It enters at number 18 – which suggests it’s really picking up steam, since the midweeks had it at 39.  The record’s actually quite good, but the video is… well, it helps if you know those are apparently their real mothers, but I still think the idea isn’t strong enough to carry the whole song.  And then there’s the canary-in-mineshaft moment at 3:05…