Ireland’s (sort of ) Got Talent
IRELAND’S GOT TALENT TV3, SATURDAY
IN SHOWBIZ, as in life, timing is everything.
Joe Molloy and the TV3 sports department were certainly the beneficiaries of good timing on Saturday evening.
After all, they managed to broadcast a game that threatened to send the nation into a collective funk of despondency, but then turned on its head with the last kick, to ensure the host and his co-panellists are now guaranteed a sort of immortality of their own – they will forever be associated with one of the great Irish sporting smash-and-grab moments.
The delight over that win even prompted the Ballymount broadcaster to delay transmission of its big-budget entry into the weekend schedules, Ireland’s Got Talent.
Even the name Ireland’s Got Talent is a hostage to fortune – let’s be honest, the pool is so small here the show’s title should have a question mark at the end.
But while basic population size means we will never have quite as endless a conveyor belt of cranks, lunatics and pathological exhibitionists as they enjoy in the UK, we still have plenty of homegrown attention-seekers.
As is now customary with such programmes, the first episode was a teaser of what the viewer can expect from the upcoming shows and, on that basis, the producers will be fairly happy.
We had the quirky ould fella playing the spoons, much to the apparent delight of judge Denise Van Outen, who was impressed – but not sufficiently impressed to put him through.
Then there were a few singers who knew they were bad (dear Lord, please tell me they knew they were bad), but evidently decided that being mocked on television is better than not being mocked at all.
There was a cute Filipino girl singing so she could win the show and pay for the rest of her family to join her in Ireland. There were a few local lads acting the maggot with a sort of weird striptease.
Then, most notably, there was the granny with the sob story who belted out a version of ‘Send In The Clowns’, while the judges dutifully teared up.
These shows are always more about the judges than the contestants, and the judges were decent.
Jason Byrne brings the required edge of carefully managed mischief, Michelle Visage has the American glamour, Van Outen is Van Outen and, let’s be honest, the real star of this show, Louis Walsh, could do this in his sleep.
Still, a solid enough debut from a programme that will struggle to be as entertaining as the other reality TV drama in Ireland at the moment – the escalating, if not entirely serious, row between Walsh and Larry Bass, who produces the rival Dancing With The Stars.