Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christmas card this year broke with his tradition of sending a beautiful reproduction of one of his own Pre-Raphaelite paintings to provide a chummy photo of his recent interview with President Putin.

That interview was the centrepiece of his new audition show on BBC TV– the fourth, following the searches for Maria, Joseph and Nancy — Your Country Needs You, which aired last night, hosted once again by Graham Norton and pitched this time as a bid to save the Eurovision Song Contest from its own tacky reputation, not a cause that readily strikes one as either worthy or indeed necessary. 

ALW and Graham went to Moscow to secure Putin’s promise of a vote for the British entry to be written by “his lordship” (as Graham keeps mock-fawningly calling him; get a grip, Gra, and let’s have some critically witty bullshit for a change) and performed by the winner of his latest talent contest.

Up to a point, this was fairly amusing, but when the jocund tunesmith entertained a bunch of foreign ambassadors to a reception in his own Drury Lane theatre in order to twist their arms, too, the whole enterprise took on a bad news feel in the light of the rigged voting scandals on other  BBC programmes.  

The song is not yet written, no-one has said who’s writing the words (to be fair, ALW always writes the music first), and ALW is anyway waiting to see who wins the viewers’ votes in a few weeks’ time. But he seems to have limited his options by coming up with a bunch of semi-amateur no-hopers, none of whom looks likely to make much impact in the vast Moscow arena.

The candidates include a pair of cry-baby twins from Sheffield; an under-powered teenager with minimal presentational skills; a bland hot-gospelling group of black guys; a suburban lounge pianist; and a gauche noodle who’s been appearing as Prince Charming in pantomime in Bromley. How can Andrew possibly write one song suitable for interpretation by so mixed and motley a cast list?

At the last minute, ALW and his selection cohort — a tediously amenable record executive called Colin Barlow — drafted in Jade, a feisty looking black singer with big hair. She at least promises a bit more than did the sweet little blonde who previously featured as a reject on the How Do You Solve a Problem called Maria? template show. She promptly became a reject on Your Country Needs You, too.

I’ll no doubt be proved wrong. Jade will crash through to stardom. The song will be a monster hit. The UK will amass a record number of winning votes. But surely a more interesting programme would have been made if Andrew had written six songs and invited the nation’s viewers to choose one of them as performed by seasoned professionals?

Thank God Andrew and Graham weren’t in charge of an open audition for Dr Who. The announcement of 26 year-old Matt Smith — so brilliant as the troubled son in Polly Stenham’s That Face — looks vaguely inspired. A Doctor Who Dares Win contest might have landed us with a nonentity from Cheshire with nice thighs, a bad haircut, a history of understudying in Starlight Express and a dangerous propensity to burst into tatty Eurovision song mode. Matt should be a little cooler than that.  
 

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.