Britain’s got talent, but there wasn’t much in the BGT final
What a calamity. ant McPartlin introduced a child magician by the wrong name. amanda holden forgot one of the dancers’ names.
and as for Simon Cowell, if he hadn’t been given prompting cards, I doubt he’d have a clue who any of the acts on stage were.
It all just about summed up Saturday night’s lacklustre Britain’s Got Talent Final (ItV) where 11 variety acts all signed up to the cliche that appearing at the Royal Variety Show would be the fulfilment of a life-long dream.
(Presumably, it would have been considered too tacky even for this self-promoting show to mention the £250,000 prize money.)
the judges tried to convince us it was ‘most open final for years’. as usual, every performer had been on a ‘journey’ — and was a ‘dark horse’ who could be ‘the surprise winner’. as for the ‘talent’, two singers confused shouting with singing. a child comedian and a ‘ comedy magician’ were more suited to toddlers’ birthday parties.
a mind-reading duo called DNa so spectacularly fluffed their routine they should have been renamed RIP. When one tried to guess the page number in a book that David Walliams had selected, they were 50 pages out. another trick involved unfathomable arithmetic. the very last thing viewers want from their Saturday night tV entertainment — a super-complicated maths lesson.
admittedly, the acts that finished in the top three positions were half decent, although comedian Daliso Chaponda (third) whinged that most of his planned material had been censored by the producers.
the winner, tokio Myers (who, as a schoolboy saw his headteacher stabbed to death by a young thug at his London school in 1995), is a genuinely talented pianist.
It’s just a shame that the rest of the line-up was so weak and would all have been buzzed off in the first round when Britain’s Got talent was in its prime ten years ago.
Perhaps the biggest puzzle was why amanda holden was uncharacteristically demure — dressed like Cinderella on her way to the ball. For his part, Cowell — unshaven, shirt hanging out and munching on mints — looked as if he wished he was somewhere else. Cliches came thick and fast in
Cardinal (BBC4), too. Detective John Cardinal was a gruff, sexist maverick with a troubled private life. he was suspended from the force for becoming obsessed with the case of a missing teenage girl whom colleagues believed was a runaway but he felt sure had been murdered.
When the girl’s body was found, he was drafted back in to catch the killer. Set in the snowy parklands of algonquin, Canada, the opening scenes seemed influenced by Fargo, the U.S. black comedy crime drama, with the gruesome nature of the crime-scenes.
Cardinal was assigned a rookie sidekick who’d never worked on a murder case before, which did nothing to improve his grumpy mood. he’d have been even angrier if he knew the truth: she’d been placed there solely to spy on him. his bosses clearly believe he’s a bad apple feeding intelligence back to Ontario’s biggest drug lord.
By the end of the second episode, the body of another missing child has been uncovered by Cardinal — indicating a serial killer was on the loose.
Cardinal had a slow but promising start and those who like their detective shows to veer towards the macabre won’t have been disappointed. annoyingly, though, the show suffers from that most modern of headaches: indecipherable mumbling — which is a cardinal sin on tV.