Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
It’s a guess fest
Blame the success of The Masked Singer if you like, but there seems to be an awful lot of guessing games on TV all of a sudden.
I don’t mean stuff like Line Of Duty, where we have to guess which character from an earlier series who no one remembers will suddenly be thrust centre stage as if they were important all along.
And I’m not talking about unofficial guessing games like Alan Carr’s Epic Gameshow, where we try to work out which of the naff prizes will end up on ebay first. (Come on, I know that’s not just me who does that!)
I mean “new” programmes such as the latest Saturday night entertainment offerings from the Big Two.
On ITV we have Game Of Talents, which sounds a bit like Game Of Thrones but offers only a fraction of the thrills. It’s basically What’s My Line? for show-offs, with a big money gameshow element shoehorned in because, well, it’s on ITV.
As background telly goes it’s fairly passable, if unnecessarily noisy.
It’s never going to get the nation talking though.
BBC1’S I Can See Your Voice, on the other hand, has potential. If nothing else, it deserves our thanks for
reintroducing a public platform for the kind of awful singers that once made The X Factor such an enjoyable and entertaining ride.
It also has two other things going for it. Its host, Paddy Mcguinness
Re BBC2’S documentary Elizabeth Taylor: A Life in Ten Pictures.
In answer to your question “Were most of them wedding photos?” – no. But I do understand why you would ask. (I can see you’re not taking this seriously), and its judging panel, which consists of Amanda Holden (I can see your desperation), Jimmy Carr (I can see you’re itching to swear) and Alison Hammond (I can see you’re, at best, tolerating Jimmy).
Each week the judges – or to give them their full and meaningless title, The Celebrity Investigators – are joined by a real pop star (I can see your agent’s going to get a b ***** king the minute this is over).
Their task is fairly simple. They must help a pair of contestants decide whether the six performers on stage look like they can sing or not. I say simple, because it’s almost a fool’s errand. You cannot tell if someone can sing simply by looking at them. However, that doesn’t stop everyone involved – including the viewers – giving it a damn good try. Some even claim there’s a science behind it. Amanda, for instance, was looking for people with strong necks, because Andrew Lloyd Webber told her that was what he looked for in a lot of his auditions. I guess that’s theatreland for you.