Why is it that both the UK’s main network broadcasters are tonight televising the final of a talent contest where the winner gets to be in a West End musical? Is it some kind of sick prank? How did one channel work out that the other’s Grease final would be held on the same Saturday night as its Joseph extravaganza?
I suspect some kind of scandalous insider dealing that goes right to the heart of the broadcasting establishment.
ITV1 is showing a new production from Simon Cowell called Britain’s Got Talent immediately after the Grease programme. You might have thought the BBC would attempt to ape this format at some point down the line. But in fact they already have, in a sense. Having gotten wind of the ITV crap-fest, they produced a rushed and more terrible-than-usual Argos version earlier this year. Shamelessly, they even got Graham Norton to present it and named it after a song by Bros.
Piers Morgan, a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, this week described the BBC programme, When Will I Be Famous, as “cheap”. And Piers knows cheap like no other.
He says his qualification for being a judge is that as editor of the Daily Mirror his job was to “find talent and put it on the cover”. Funny how he neglects to mention his disastrous decision to attempt to take the tabloid upmarket and his so-called “war on celebrities”, a policy that cost hundreds of thousands of readers and was immediately reversed when he got unceremoniously fired. The clot.
(Roy Greenslade’s analysis of Piers Morgan’s baffling 2001 editorial strategy is here, but registration is required, unfortunately.)
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