Paul’s already shared with you some of the best examples of ludicrously bad auditions from Series 7 so far, and it’s only three weeks old. Here’s another couple. They couldn’t sing either, but at least they found love and each other on the Idol message boards, and met up for the first time at the Charleston auditions. Depending on your point of view you’re either reaching for the tissues or the sick bag right about now.
For some reason ITV2 has chosen this year to broadcast two hour-long audition programmes each week, which I still can’t quite get my head round, but with a bazillion repeats throughout the week my pathological missing of the Thursday night show is not a problem. So compared to how crap The X Factor was last time around, what is it about American Idol that keeps me coming back for more?
Out of the 10,000 auditionees at Charleston, 23 yellow tickets to Hollywood were issued. Twenty three. So it’s no wonder the audition programmes concentrate on the bad singers. That’s pretty much all there is. Even so, American Idol seems to do it so much better than X Factor. There’s the homey footage of Aretha down on the farm, or cheerleading her local high school football team, or singing in the choir, and it’s all done so well you can never really tell if this is going to be a yellow ticket, or a yellow bucket.
Unless they look nerdy. Just for once I’d love a nerdy-looking character to shuffle onto the set shedding dandruff and pushing their glasses up their greasy nose, and then open their throat and sing like an angel. Just once. But no, they all screech, or wail, or croak. It’s not just the nerdy ones either. Some of the total stunners, the chiselled guys, the air force cadets – even the girl who flew transport aircraft to Eye Rack – couldn’t sing this week. Charleston will just have to hold on to its memory of Kelly Pickler because this year at least, there was no-one there that came close.
Another major plus AI has is its judging panel. For me, the chemistry between Randy, Paula and Simon, and the constant good-natured bickering between host Ryan Seacrest and the three of them (well OK, mainly Simon) far outshines XF. Randy is a genuinely nice guy who “keeps it real,” has a great sense of humour and is just permanently happy. Paula is a total flake but in the nicest possible way, and her regular tantrums are never anything but entertaining. And Simon is Simon.
Compare that with pinhead Louis Walsh who parrots the same comments time after time and behaves like the worst kind of prima donna, and Sharridan Osbourne whose raucous screechings become ever more irritating as the years pass. No contest. Don’t even mention Dermot O’Dreary.
I never thought I’d say this, but AI also makes it obvious that “everything is bigger in America.” The sassy contestants are sassier, the fat ones are fatter, the weird ones are weirder and the ones that go off on a rant one are just so not on this planet. It’s simply more entertaining.
Finally, the currency of X Factor has been devalued by the relatively limited success of its discoveries. Steve Brookstein disappeared without trace, Shayne Ward’s album sales have been disappointing and Leona took so long to release an album that it only just managed to make an appearance before the next X Factor winner was crowned (although I should add that in the few months it’s been out it has already sold more than three times as many copies as Ward’s and gone 5x Platinum).
Compare that to the success achieved from the AI stable, with multiple Grammy- and Billboard-award winning artists selling multi-platinum albums and setting records for speed of reaching chart positions and length of stay. The American Idol wikipedia entry reads like a statistician’s dream. Longevity doesn’t seem to be a problem for Idol winners either, with Season 1 winner Kelly Clarkson still racking up the hits seven years later. All this adds up to a better return on investment for viewers. They know they could easily be watching the creation of another music legend, whereas with X Factor all you’re watching is another leg end.
American Idol: ITV2, Thursdays and Fridays at varying times, and repeats throughout the week
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