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So we’re in new talent show season, The Voice UK got off to a strong start yesterday but I’ve no real interest in that, instead I’ve just watched Harry Hill’s Star’s In Their Eyes on catch-up which was SITE with added Harry Hill zanyness. This is quite a difficult tone for the show to take – on the one hand there seems little point directly competing with serious talent shows, and there’s certainly no point being the same as The Voice, on the other hand the original show ran for almost twenty years and there’s a certain expectation of what it’s going to be like and anyone expecting a show like the original got a fairly rude wake-up call.
In truth as a parody of light-entertainment masquerading as light-entertainment I enjoyed it (although I also accept I didn’t really watch much of the original back in the day), I thought the presentation and formatting gags were quite funny (“the not live final! It’s not live, but it is a final. And winning Stars in Their Eyes is unlikely to change your life, but then it won’t ruin it either,” and the Brucie style “What have they got?” “STARS!” “Where are the stars?” “IN THEIR EYES!”) and they found decent people to play along with the gags in their normal life VTs, if not brilliant singers in the main. In truth I probably would have dropped a couple of the sillier sketches like the bread fight and Adele’s baby, maybe they should have emphasised Harry Hill a bit more in the titling.
Although a rating of 3.7m (inc. +1) is going to feel disappointing, it’s really not much worse than other new ITV light-entertainment offerings in the last few years. The worrying thing is that people seemed to be tuning out of it across the hour. The fun thing is knowing that the’re filming about a week ahead so we can see if they make changes – the horse has already bolted I expect, episode two is in the can so if they’re going to make changes it will be from episode three. Really it’s Dick and Dom’s Ask the Family all over again – another show I enjoyed, but another show that got gradually less fun after audience reaction.
Next Sunday Get Your Act Together begins which may or may not be an Endemol Joe production, and really I’ve got no idea how it will do – people watch Britain’s Got Talent, but Sunday Night at the Palladium was only doing 3.5m (but has been recommissioned). So we’ll see. What we do know is that it’s all in the can apart from the live final.
I agree with Nick on Stars in Their Eyes. It’s a comedy sketch show that just happens to include some people singing. My hope is that word of mouth will sell it to people who watched TV Burp but wouldn’t go near a singing show.
Get Your Act Together is an ITV Studios production. This doesn’t preclude it from having a credit “Devised by: ENDEMOL JOE”. The UKGS pixies are straining at the Tuesday embargo to say more.
Interesting Stars in their Eyes isn’t all in the can yet. I can’t see changes being made though if they thought that was OK in the first place – the direction they’ve taken was never really going to work.
As great as it is that ITV haven’t gone down the usual host route with this it seems now the best option if Stars is to remain beyond this series will be to replace the host and take it more seriously next year.
I do think all the Harry Hill nonsense kind of hid the problems the show had with the talent itself, most of which would be buzzed off an audition for Britain’s Got Talent within seconds.
Filming tomorrow and Friday at Elstree, tickets Applause Store. Would love to be a fly on the wall of those production meetings.
The problem is…Peter Kay already did the joke years ago!
For me the funniest part was right at the start when Matthew Kelly became Harry Hill. After that, I got bored within 5 minutes. The sketches are what started to ruin TV Burp for me in the later years so I was never really going to get along with this.
From what I’ve seen so far the reception is 98% negative 2% positive. Bringing back a show, fine, trying to change the genre from a light entertainment show to a fully blown out comedy / slapstick, not gonna go down too well I’m afraid…
One of the smaller things I quite enjoyed which was quite subtley played is the pointless clues the guests give to who they’re going to be being rather more out there then they would have been back in the day.
Well it seems to have gone down quite well in my office. I would be intrigued to see how it did demographically, as the raw number might not tell the whole picture here.
Watched the first 10-15 minutes or so and the last 5 minutes of Stars In Their Eyes and rather enjoyed it. Fingers crossed that they can throw the kitchen sink into trying to do every single gag they can think of in a single glorious swing-and-a-miss series, rather than trying to get several years out of it.
I have this horrible suspicion that if ITV were ever going to do a big shiny-floor lots-of-mucking-about version of Avanti! then they would say “mucking about? That calls for Harry Hill!”, then probably have lots of celebrities playing for charity, including an endgame where the audience shout out to help the contestant along with the 11 Questions Wrong. With hilarious consequences!!!
They have celebs playing every Sunday in the Italian show, and whilst there’s certainly a slightly more loose interpretation of some of the rules during the main game, the end game is still played straight. I think the issue with Harry Hill would be a certain lack of gravitas.