Britain's Got Talent: A weary groan of a TV programme
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Version 0 of 1. Watching a Britain's Got Talent semi-final can feel a bit like seeing lots of difficult second albums being recorded. The contestants have all spent months, perhaps years, toiling over an act that's good enough to get them noticed. But once they've succeeded they have to start all over again. In no time at all, they're required to think up something that manages to be new and similar and different at the same time. More often than not, their attempts end in miserable failure, which is why BGT's semi-finals become the sort of gruelling endurance test that leaves you shaking and crying and howling for someone to liven things up with a glimmer of competence. But even allowing for this flaw in the show's format, last night's episode was a weary groan of a thing. The acts – even by the standards of a show that once gave half a million pounds to a dog – were below par. The judges were uninspired. Even Ant and Dec, usually the model of precision-honed professionalism, started eating their own faces with embarrassment as they introduced the first performers, "a dance act with a wild west theme". That dance act – a troupe called Countryvive who counted in their number a woman who'd unfortunately gone Full Schwimmer with the fake tan – turned out to be a perfectly limp barometer of things to come. There was a funny foreigner. There were a couple of singers, one who looked like Olly Murs' farmer uncle and one who didn't. There were dancing kids. There was a magician whose USP was looking a bit like Justin Timberlake 15 years ago. There was a Jim Henson copyright infringement lawsuit in the making. There was an impressionist who simply wheeled out a load of unaltered advertising slogans in their entirety to a studio audience confused by the sudden lack of noises they could clap along to. And then there was Collabro. Imagine what G4 would be like if they had a name so awful that you couldn't quite bring yourself to say it out loud. That's Collabro. They were always going to win last night, partly because they were the only act who didn't look like they'd been arbitrarily rounded up and piled into a van by producers at 3am, but mainly because they were last to perform and therefore had a much greater chance of winning. The fact that everyone knows how this works just made the show's 90-minute running time seem like a cruel joke. If last night's dismal parade had any saving grace at all, it was Simon Cowell. It might be the stresses of fatherhood, or the disappointment about The X Factor's failure in America, but he really isn't taking any prisoners this year. And not in his camp, insult-heavy way of old. This is like watching a heavyweight boxer at the end of the 12th round. He doesn't so much judge acts any more as sigh at them. He can barely summon up the power to care. As such, he's the perfect analogue for the viewer at home. At the start of last night's episode, Amanda Holden embarked on a long, directionless anecdote about how fun it is to go downhill on a bike. If the show itself is any indication, it's a miracle the wheels didn't come off entirely. |