You can tell it’s nearly Christmas because the arguments in the Shooter’s bulletins have descended to a seasonal lull of point scoring and scruffy logic. Glancing through today’s arguments about the National Minimum Wage and Rage Against The Machine was like trying to eat a massive fatty dinner whilst three generations of the same dysfunctional family squabbled over the party hats and who’s go it is with the remote control.

I thought Rage Against The Machine had split up and become Audioslave. Even if they’ve got back together the idea that a song from ten years ago going “head to head” with the X-Factor winner represents anything other than the height of banality leaves me baffled. As far as pop culture goes this is about as incendiary as Jon Lydon’s butter adverts.

What does pain me though is the suggestion that the reality TV show the X-Factor has anything to do with filmmaking. Just because they make it using cameras doesn’t mean it falls within our world. Granted if it stopped being made then camera hire companies would lose revenue, in the same way that if no one got married for a year the slump in the wedding video market would lead to a glut in the Z1 category on eBay, but please don’t imagine either impossible event would cripple the British film industry. We may not be in the rudest of health at the moment but we do not live on Simon Cowell’s table scraps.

Even more horrifying was the attempt to draw a parallel between aspiring filmmakers and the programme’s contestants. True, at first glance, both wannabe filmmakers and wannabe singers are chasing what for most will be impossible dreams. But the dream on offer in the X-Factor is always the same dream. The hopefuls compete not for their chance to share their unique gift but for their chance to have their unique gift homogenised into something that sells. Is that really all we’re trying to do? If it’s fame you want then making films seems like a funny way of going about it, at least not without first moving to LA and getting your teeth fixed.

Shocking as it may seem but some of the people I know still do things for reasons other than fame and money. For instance, tonight one of my bands, The Glue Ensemble, are rehearsing and we’ll be playing the closing night of the LSFF in a few weeks time. None of us are being paid for tonight’s rehearsal, nor for that gig (though we do get paid money at times…) and yet none of us seem to mind because we’re all doing it for… what’s the word… love.

Similarly when my friends and I went to Jersey a few months ago to make a film we didn’t do so for profit but for the sheer crazy pleasure of doing something difficult and beautiful. We didn’t sleep, we froze, we climbed hills, we made a film that tried to capture some thought about forgiveness and all just to make our lives both harder and more enjoyable. This is what the past ten years of my life has been about. Telling stories with pictures because me and a bunch of other people I like wanted to and slowly finding out that a bunch of other people want to watch those stories, often time and again.

So as a final sprig of holly on your christmas puddin’, can I respectfully suggest that you shut the fuck up about the national minimum wage.

The decade long campaign to grind Shooting People into the dust for its support of creative work where no one gets paid comes from a good hearted place but is fundamentally wrong headed. I am completely in favour of being paid and completely against people engaged in someone else’s commercial activity not getting a fair recompense for their work. However a great deal of the work that is created through Shooting People is not a genuine commercial activity because, no matter how much the creators may wish otherwise, there is no market for it. Does that mean they should be banned from making it?

In a world driven entirely by commerce it is right that we protect jobs and wages. A world driven entirely by commerce gives us the X-Factor and a constant repackaging of the same tired idea. Thankfully, even at Christmas, we don’t have to live in that world.