Watch TV with Paul Flynn
THE FIRST MIC-DROP, WTAF moment of psychedelic primetime weekend vaudeville show The Masked Singer happened at the end of episode two. The panel (The Hangover stalwart Ken Jeong, reality royalty Davina Mccall, pop pin-up Rita Ora and national institution Jonathan Ross) were debating who lies beneath the bedazzled costume of The Pharaoh. In a moment of absolute delirium, a state of fervour percolating beneath every minute of The Masked Singer’s airtime, old Wossy suggested the hidden talent might be… Tony Blair.
A collective gasp from the audience filled the studio, prompting their demented chant of ‘Take it o ff !’, encouraging the singer’s identity unmasking, like a rust-belt Trump rally with added Lewis Capaldi songs. It wasn’t Blair who had been singing for his supper. It was Alan Johnson, an actual Right Honourable, a member of the former Prime Minister’s Cabinet. In that second, a phenomenon, flecked with Dalí-esque surrealism, was born.
The Masked Singer stands in stoic opposition to every piece of doctrinaire January blues. Best viewed partially drunk, it’s a brilliantly daft format that stays true to the tired shiny-floor talent show schtick, while subverting them all with baroque pantomime flourishes. A succession of undisclosed famous faces – whose identities are currently being treated by ITV as a righteous state secret – sing a song, through which our panel must try and deduce the face behind the voice. The panel suggestions are a testament to the show’s barking mad, joyful randomness. Before The Darkness singer Justin Hawkins (famous for five minutes in 2003) unveiled himself from beneath diamanté Chameleon costumery, guesses went from Anthony Joshua through Jason Statham to Tom Daley.
Bonkers guesswork is only part of the ribald beauty of this carnival roadshow, a true, new manifestation of William Blake’s Songs Of Innocence And Experience. It was only while watching a crocodile tear fall down the cheekbones of Ms Ora that I realised how much I’d needed to witness a larger than life-size duck singing Ave Maria.
The Masked Singer is both child’s sugarrush and adult LSD experience. Its producers have thus nailed family entertainment at its core. The only thing that could make this more madness of the UK: 2020 is if Meghan Markle turned out to be the Queen Bee. Saturdays and Sundays, 8pm, ITV1