The death knell is tolling for the TV talent show
Ready, steady, cringe. Two new talent shows splattered onto our screens on Saturday night; two giant custard pies fired from a blunderbuss loaded with full cream showbiz hokum. Let It Shine on BBC1 and ITV’s reboot of The Voice dominated the weekend schedules with more than three hours — three hours! — of prime-time programming featuring yet more veal crates full of hopefuls shipped in from all over the country, squeaking their little hearts out.
yes, there were some sweet voices in the mix as the pimpled aspirants and the wideeyed optimists put their best tonsils forward in a bid for fame.
yet dud followed flop, no-hoper followed flinty stage school brat, in the usual parade of deluded wannabes and vested interests.
Making it worse was the fact that all these performances were framed in shows that have become curdled variations of the same, tired old formats — with shrinking viewing figures denoting increasing public apathy.
Fifteen years after Will young won the first Pop Idol, ten years after The X Factor made Leona Lewis a star, eight years after Susan Boyle first dreamed a dream on Britain’s Got Talent, haven’t we suffered enough?
among the caterwauling, do I hear the death knell tolling for the end of the modern telly talent show? Fingers crossed.
after much fanfare, BBC1 launched Let It Shine, Gary Barlow’s quest to find five singers to form a boyband, who will then appear in a touring musical based on the songs of Take That.
To be honest, it sounds more like a punishment than a prize — the sort of gig that could end a career rather than begin one. However, there was no shortage of hopefuls capering before judge Barlow and his panel, which included amber Riley, dannii Minogue and Martin Kemp.
Nice people one and all, but it would be hard to care what any of them do or think about anything, unless you were trapped in a burning building and they were at the business end of a hose.
Straight away there was the smack of chicanery — or at least that familiar, uncomfortable talent show feeling that proceedings are never as fair or straightforward as producers would have us believe.
AMoNG the contestants was Jason Brock, a 30-year-old professional singer and dancer who is starring in Thriller Live in London’s West end. He was previously in a band called 5Boyz and narrowly missed out on a place in the Pop Idol live shows in 2003. Surely Jason is too old, too experienced and too established to be in a talent show like Let It Shine?
No, said ringmaster Barlow. It has to be open to everyone — and Jason was promptly put through to the next round. No wonder the public get so fed up.
Meanwhile, ITV has nabbed The Voice, which was shown on BBC1 until last year. The re- launch provided little that was new and exciting, except for the return of sacked judge Sir Tom Jones, who at least has always seemed genuinely interested in the music.
That irritating moon pixie Will.i.am was as baffling as ever, while new judges Jennifer Hudson and Gavin Rossdale filled in the shade at either end of the spectrum. She was terrific; he was hopeless.
My chief beef with The Voice is that the entire premise of the show is based on a lie, which is that looks and personal charisma don’t matter in showbusiness. With very rare exceptions (toothless harmonica players from Mississippi, Janis Joplin), they mean absolutely everything. and especially in the age of one direction, Taylor Swift and Instagram, where multiple images are uploaded and pored over by millions on social media.
It is cruel to let aspirational youngsters believe otherwise, and the fact that over five series The Voice has singularly failed to find anyone with star quality or staying power says it all.
What is it even doing back on our screens? Surely we have reached saturation point. There can hardly be a teenager left in the land who has not auditioned for one of these shows, while the public have become battle-hardened to stories of ‘journeys’ and heartbreak.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time Simon Cowell’s The X Factor on ITV could pull in audiences of more than 14 million.
But even that juggernaut has been in slow decline since the all-female pop group Little Mix won in 2011.
The final of the last series, broad- cast in december, was watched by its lowest ever audience — seven million viewers.
Pop talent shows are particularly vulnerable because technology has moved on in a way that empowers every kid singing into a hairbrush or strumming a guitar in their bedroom.
Many of today’s switched- on wannabes don’t need a TV show to get exposure.
Like Justin Bieber, they put videos of themselves on youTube instead. or look at adele, who bypassed the whole talent show farrago when a friend posted her three-song demo on an online platform called Myspace. The rest is pop history.
There is a lot to be said for cheerful, family TV entertainment, especially if it’s led by a glazed and bland Gary Barlow — the nation’s favourite singing teacake — oozing syrupy bonhomie. yet the public and the contestants are too knowing about the process.
Shows such as Let It Shine and The Voice, which repeat a formula, are always in danger of turning into sad pantomimes.
But now we are beyond even that. endlessly encouraging dreamy teenagers to believe that stardom and easy riches are theirs for the taking is an increasingly uncomfortable spectacle — especially when the talent show graveyards are piled high with the corpses of those who failed to make it big.
In the razzmatazz opening number that launched Let It Shine, Gary Barlow sang a cheerful song about wannabes singing in the shower.
‘Could the noise I am making deserve a bigger audience than my flannel and shampoo?’ he trilled.
We’ve come so far, we’ve been through so much together. But the answer is still ‘No’.