Gracious, it's already the time of year when aggrieved music lovers traditionally surge forth to condemn The X Factor. Should we expect another po-faced campaign to rob Simon Cowell of the Christmas No 1? Or just more industrial-level whinging from those who fret about how it's destroying British music. That it is not about "real" music (maan!), just bubblegum pap, and televised slop, for the masses. How such shows clog up the industry, suck up all the resources, make it impossible for new artists to catch a break.

Maybe The X Factor could be judged guilty of all these things, and more (British music should not be wholly forged in weekend TV).

However, perhaps the British music industry could also learn something from The X Factor – a show that not only promotes working-class kids but also, far less famously, gives black performers a fair hearing.

It seems to me that The X Factor is fast becoming one of the least racist, and most colourblind, annexes of the modern British music industry.

Of the 12 acts that made it to this year's live shows, almost half were non-white – two of the girls, two of the groups, and one in the over-26 category. Out of many thousands of auditionees, roughly 40% of those selected were black, or mixed race.

Would the rest of the British music industry (particularly those who disdain Cowell's TV-juggernaut) care to offer up their numbers – give out their percentages of how many new black artists they took on board, nurtured and promoted this year?

Indeed, it's a recurring scandal how black British artists struggle to get signed, or find themselves sidelined, under-marketed, and finally dropped – particularly females, many of whom end up providing backing vocals.

The likes of Heather Small and Estelle have remarked on the racist (and, in the former's case, sexist) aspects of the industry. The Mercury prize chair, Simon Frith, commenting on 2009's winner, Speech Debelle, said that black female artists "always had a particularly tough time".

Fair enough, but then we come to The X Factor, a huge primetime show with a decent track record regarding black/Asian/mixed-race artists, boasting two winners (Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke) and a slew of finalists and contenders (including One Direction, JLS, Rebecca Ferguson, Little Mix, Mischa B and Marcus Collins). Moreover, a show whose audience thinks nothing of a final 12 where 40% of the performers are black.

Some might say that the audience is the point – that some artists are selected because they reflect large swaths of The X Factor demographic (young and broke), and the show is cynically peddling fantasies of escape, reward and validation.

How to put this politely? Just get over it. What does anyone expect when these young people have often grown up in environments where poverty and lack of opportunity are not sob stories to be mocked but harsh facts of life?

This has long been The X Factor's strength. For a show featuring four judges, crucially, it does not prejudge its contestants. Rather wonderfully, this appears to extend to the "marketability" of the colour of their skin. Unlike other areas of the industry, race doesn't seem to be an issue.

So how did we get here? Britain prides itself on being anti-racist – it gave the world the likes of 2 Tone and Rock against Racism. How could it be, in 2013, that one of the most level playing fields available to black artists appears to be a primetime TV talent show?

While The X Factor is far from perfect, and generally more about good telly than great music, kudos should be given for its stubbornly colour-blind approach.

Only Sally's tots redeem her tatts from being tatty

Why has the Speaker's wife, Sally Bercow, decided to get a tattoo? Why would anyone get a tattoo, who's not under 25, on a beach in Goa, smashed on tequila?

Obviously there are serious tattoo aficionados, whose dedication must be respected, even if some of them are going to go into old age resembling crumpled copies of Whizzer and Chips.

At least the real illustrated community are serious about it. The part-timers, the tatt-tourists and their half-baked vanilla scribblings, however, are another breed altogether. Do they really need those 2mm butterflies, shooting stars and hummingbirds on their wrists or ankles for the rest of their lives? As if to say: "Look at me, I got a really tiny feeble tattoo you can hardly see just to prove that I'm totally pathetic."

Bercow had her children's names inked, tweeting: "I will never regret having tatt of my kids."

In fairness, this may be the only tattoo that makes sense for the part-timer – certainly better than meaningless doodles or names of lovers who may come and go. Only our children are as permanent as the ink is going to be.

Some of us would kill for 10 hours' kip

Research from Penn State University says that weekend lie-ins don't recharge the batteries as much as we might have hoped, or fully compensate for hectic overworked weeks. While the extra rest at the weekend did make people less sleepy, gave them lower stress levels and had myriad other benefits, according to the research, their attention spans showed no improvement.

The researchers put 30 people on a schedule emulating a busy working week, with six hours of sleep a night, followed by two nights where they were allowed to sleep for 10 hours. Ten hours! What unimaginable luxury is this? If I slept for 10 hours it would be so unusual I'd be pronounced dead. I'd wake up to a compact mirror held to my mouth, and someone riffling through the knicker drawer for the will.

One also suspects that the 30 people in this study didn't have small children. For a parent to get 10 hours' sleep, the kids would have to be taken into care (not that this wouldn't be negotiable). Moreover, parents would agree to anything to get those 10-hour-long kips, including pretending to have enhanced attention spans.

The only other thing to induce such squalid desperation is a really spiky hangover. "Whatever you want to prove with this study, I'll say it, just please let me sleep."

Indeed, the knackered, the hungover, the parents of young children, and those poor damned souls who are a combination of all three, cannot cope with such random concepts as an uninterrupted blissful 10 hours' sleep. These are people who would cook their own grandmother for just an extra 20 minutes in their pit.

Fine and laudable though Penn State's study is, they may need to go back and repeat the whole thing, using a more realistic time-scale.