I’m not quite so sure it has
The Simon Cowell vehicle Britain’s Got Talent returned to ITV1 last night for the start of a new series and I am not ashamed to report that, for my sins, I was among its viewers.
I am familiar with both Britain’s Got Talent and The X-Factor, Cowell’s other big show, largely because in the early years I watched them occasionally by deliberate decision and later on – i.e. whenever some act or another was spectacularly good or notorious enough to attract national viral attention (e.g. singer Susan Boyle and … er, er … all those others whose neither names nor performances I can now recall) – I used to seek them out on YouTube and/or the websites of newspapers out of curiosity.
In more recent times – the last five or six years – I had tended to agree with those television critics and Cowell-haters who have gone public with knocking copy to the effect that both series, no matter how creatively tinkered with each year, are tired, transparently formulaic and (like all things created by man) towards the end of their natural lives, citing with glee the unanswerable proof of successively falling ratings.
Things always move on – that’s a fact of life and a generational thing – whether your field of interest is music, fashion, mobile phones or social media, or even live entertainment performances. It’s partly because human flesh is weak and stuff happens to it over time: whether you’re an actor cast as James Bond or a kid lucky enough to be chosen to be in a teenage heart-throb boy band, there’s always going to be point after which you’re no longer credible.
Hell, by the end good old Roger Moore (bless him) was practically sleepwalking through his 007 performances, presumably deliberately playing Bond as a semi-wooden caricature with half an ironic wink at the cinema audience as he did so.
And who can forget music hall veteran Jack Warner, who played Dixon in the BBC series Dixon Of Dock Green in all 432 episodes from 1955 to 1976?
The poor fellow was over sixty and past real-life police retirement age at the time when he took on the role and was still behind the police sergeant’s desk at Dock Green – presumably semi-embalmed and propped up with sandbags – at the age of 81 when it finally ground to a halt.
I happened to be working in ITV in the 1980s when it was common for the network to try and outbid out-bid the Beeb for its own staple light entertainment giants – as I type, the likes of Morecambe and Wise and Mike Yarwood spring immediately to mind.
Although some complained that ITV was failing to produce its own stars and instead simply buying established ‘talent’ that the Beeb had nurtured and developed over the decades, the practice actually suited both parties.
ITV was desperate to attract advertising revenue and what the advertisers wanted was mass audiences, whilst the Beeb had limited budgets and – if they timed the ‘letting go’ adroitly – they could rid themselves of expensive household names just as they were judged to be beginning the downward slide and replace them with exciting new talent fast coming up behind … and without offending either.
Of those examples I mentioned earlier, Morecambe and Wise moved from the BBC to ITV in 1978. Eric Morecambe then suffered his second heart attack in the spring of the following year, resulting in him having a by-pass operation and at one stage being told he had three months to live.
The truth was, although they were given every facility and consideration at Thames Television, for whom they worked up until 1983, not least because of Eric’s health problems they were already on the slide and their ITV years can be viewed with hindsight as pension money (Morecambe eventually died on 28th May 1984).
Mike Yarwood was another classic case in point.
During the 1970s he ranked almost alongside Morecambe and Wise in terms of importance to the BBC light entertainment roster – his impressions of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Brian Clough, Magnus Pike, Frank Spencer and Alf Garnett (to list but a few) were much-loved staples of every television viewer’s Christmas diet.
However, when Thames also signed him, he never replicated his BBC success. By the early 1980s – with slicker, more ironic and edgier impressionists and others breaking through and many of his regular ‘targets’ no longer dominating politics or the TV screens – for a number of reasons Yarwood failed to adapt, lost his mojo, and sank without trace almost as fast as he had risen all those years ago on the back of a one-off Sunday Night At The London Palladium appearance in 1964.
But I digress – let us return to last night and the opening edition of 2017’s Britain’s Got Talent, following on from Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway series as ITV’s attempt to maintain its supposed stranglehold on the UK’s Saturday night viewing.
As usual, ITV has pressed all the buttons you’d expect. The judging panel line-up has reverted to stereotype – Cowell himself, of course, Aleisha Dixon, Amanda Holden and David Walliams – and (as belt and braces, ratings-wise) Ant and Dec are as ever being rolled out once again as not so behind-the-scenes hosts, presumably for shedloads of money.
Plenty of cash has been thrown at the show (again) in an attempt to give it a refreshed look and – naturally – all the panel have been doing the media circuit of familiar stop-offs (e.g. The One Show and all BBC Radio stations) to testify that ‘this is the best series yet!’ and similar in the run up to last night’s opener.
In addition we had been subjected all week to media ‘rumour alerts’ and advance publicity for the stand-out (or the opposite) acts that appeared last night.
And so to the show as transmitted on ITV last night, apparently from 8.00pm until 9.25pm (I have to say that because your reporter gave up at 8.40pm and went to bed).
I was deeply unimpressed. The judging panel did their usual things – Walliams camping it up, the ladies getting all weepy over the more sentimental back-stories of the auditioning acts, and Cowell himself looking more world-weary and smug than ever before … and that is saying something.
And the acts were distinctly ordinary as well, even the ones wheeled out as ‘winners’ on the night.
There was an 8 year old boy from Kent who’d attracted some adverse publicity with an ‘iffy’ gag about the lack of dog acts on the series this season (“Mind you, Amanda’s been on the show for years …”). He wasn’t even much cop at telling his jokes – he appealed mainly on the sentiment angle being so young, of course – but he was waved through in short order with four ‘yes’s.
The other act given the classic big build-up was a large choir consisting entirely of parents and family members who had one thing in common – the fact that an offspring or close relative had gone ‘missing’ and never been heard of since.
We were carefully ‘teed up’ in advance by being shown video footage of them chatting to Ant and Dec backstage, walking through a park, with their white-haired leader explaining what they were all about.
Once out on stage, Cowell himself did the ‘Who are you, and what do you do?’ bit – despite the fact that the latter was pretty bloody obvious from the fact they taken up position in three tiers in the centre of the stage.
The judging panel and half the packed London theatre sighed adoringly and reached for their handkerchiefs when their purpose was explained for the benefit of the TV audience, bottom lips quivering and eyes moistening.
And then they performed their ditty entitled (something like) They Are Missing. It was pretty corny and average, to be honest – as indeed was the quality of their singing, which by no stretch of the imagination warranted the standing ovation given it by both panel and theatre audience at its conclusion.
The panel gushed at them, however, both panellists and choir members simpering with emotion as they did, with Cowell himself bringing things to a climax with a little speech about how important it was to get their message across.
This viewer was seriously under-whelmed.
By the time the next act came on, a lady in gym gear carrying a Maltese terrier mutt under her arm, who announced to the panel that she was about to demonstrate ‘Dow-ga’ [viz. doing yoga with your dog] … I decided that I’d had enough and crawled away to bed.
