I’ll write a summary of ECTS tomorrow, probably; it was basically a bit rubbish, but the beer was good 🙂 Instead, I’m motivated to write a little rant about Fame Academy.
Last year, to my shame, I got quite into the first series. It was unashamedly popcorn TV, but it was infinitely better than the pap that ITV continually put out, in that it actually attempted to develop the talents of the contestants, and it was quite interesting to watch them develop musically and as individual artists. I still think Ainslie should have won.
I’ll confess to having not paid it much attention this year – I couldn’t name any of the contestants, although I’d probably recognise them if you described them to me. The thing is, though, this year, even though they insist they’re trying to develop each of their individual talents, you can see the contestants already being forced into one of the few pre-existing pigeonholes for pop music at the moment. Tonight, I saw Pink, Ronan Keating and Craig David, amongst others. So much for allowing development of individual talent.
The original series of Fame Academy deserved some praise, for trying to break the mould of prepackaged, manufactured pop and for concentrating on the strengths of the individual artists, rather than trying to see how well they’ll fit with a particular (prechosen) producer’s backing tracks (okay, in the event, none of the contestants actually turned out a decent record, except for maybe that new one by Lamarr, which has taken a year to get to is and is good if not particularly stunning) but this year they’ve pretty much sold out to the Pop Idol format – they’ve even got their own Simon Cowell, except older.
Oh, and “Tainted Love” wasn’t originally done by Soft Cell. They covered it. It was originally sung by Gloria Jones. Soft Cell just did the best version of it.
Cat Deeley, though. Mmmm.