OK – it’s a well known fact to people who read this blog or sit near me at work that I hate all reality shows.
That said, there are a couple I watch despite myself. The Apprentice is getting close to boring me as they choose a nice cross section of generally inept people, but I’m still bearing with it. Then there’s Strictly Come Dancing and most recently Maestro.
It’s those latter two I’m going to talk about here – if only to question myself.
Maestro has busily been taking a group of “celebrities” and teaching them how to conduct an orchestra. At the end of each week one or more of them is eliminated. The contestants are scored by judges, and because that’s far too straightforward, the BBC Concert Orchestra votes to decide which of the bottom two stay in the competition. I suppose we should count our lucky stars that the public largely aren’t involved. At least they weren’t until last night.
It’s been an unusual show in the sense that particularly in the first programme, I felt as though I was actually learning about something hadn’t previously really understood – a conductor is doing somewhat more than just waving a baton in time with the music. But by the second week, the show had changed tack, and although we weren’t quite “following their journeys”, we had less time to learn about the intricacies of what’s involved, and more time just watching the contestants perform.
In the final, as I mentioned, suddenly we were presented with an audience vote to determine the winner. The real problem with this isn’t that I might be overcharged in a rigged phone-vote; the problem is that I don’t have the skills to be able to determine which is the better performance. Many’s the time during the series that I thought I’d just seen a good performance, only to be corrected by the judges who said that they were smiling too much or bouncing around or whatever.
In point of fact, this series would have worked just as well without famous people at all. Ideally all the contestants should have had similar musical training/backgrounds. As it was, Sue Perkins who won, can play the piano to a significant level. That’s got to help.
Moving onto my other guilty pleasure – Strictly Come Dancing. Again the viewing public is being asked to judge something they’re really not able to. Most of us can’t dance, and while we might know what we enjoy when we see it, don’t understand the technicalities of it.
But more to the point, it’s the dancing that we enjoy. The format is accessible and there’s plenty of concession for the new viewer about what we should be seeing in a particular dance.
OK – so we’ll leave Strictly alone. But then last Saturday saw the second edition of the Eurovision Dance Competition, and in a tweaked format, we suddenly had to have an amateur (who was in most cases a celebrity of some sort in their home country). Why did we need this?
Someone who stars in The Bill in the UK is unknown throughout most of the rest of Europe, so that’s only a sop to the UK audience. If we appreciate good dancing, why don’t we just have professional dancers representing us?
Frankly, the BBC should simply bring back Come Dancing. The old format would need a tweak, but I’m sure it could work. There’s just no need to have the public vote at every moment, and for actors, singers, sportsmen and women et al taking part. The change would be refreshing!