{"id":5483,"date":"2012-03-26T00:46:03","date_gmt":"2012-03-25T23:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=5483"},"modified":"2012-05-07T13:38:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-07T12:38:49","slug":"the-voice-uk-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=5483","title":{"rendered":"The Voice UK, then"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yeah it was alright.<\/p>\n<p>I watched the first ep on catchup this evening, I didn&#8217;t come into it with many preconceptions &#8211; I&#8217;m well aware of the Dutch original, and I&#8217;m well aware of the success the US version\u00a0has had and I know how they work but I haven&#8217;t watched them &#8211; reality singing contests are a gameshow subgenre (sod off elsewhere if you want to argue that point) that doesn&#8217;t interest me all that greatly despite their prevelance on the schedules and the masses of viewers they can bring in. So with this in mind because it&#8217;s late, some bulletpoints:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I\u00a0really like\u00a0Holly Willoughby, she&#8217;s bubbly and fun and can think on her feet, and I have no issue with Reggie Yates who, you know, was good\u00a0in <em>Trinity<\/em>, but they were a bit anonymous here. Presumably they will have more of a presence after the blind auditions.<\/li>\n<li>I like the set. It is also very red.<\/li>\n<li>The coaches. Here&#8217;s the thing, basically everyone loves Jessie J and Tom Jones, Will.I.Am comes across as a little bit of a twat bless him whilst the surprise is Danny O&#8217; Donoghue, despite being probably the least well known of the four, seems to have landed himself in some sort of Len Goodman\u00a0judge&#8217;s spokesperson role. As a group they do have a certain chemistry.<\/li>\n<li>The way the show is structured as effectively four different competitions\u00a0 building up to a sort of champion of champions finale is great, and makes much more natural sense as a coaches contest then the rather more mish-mash way <em>The X Factor<\/em> does it.<\/li>\n<li>If more than one judge turns round then the act gets to choose the coach. This is an ingenious power shift. Unfortunately there seems to be a natural inclination to choose Jessie and Tom over Will and Danny who currently\u00a0feel very much like consolation prizes.<\/li>\n<li>Because of the way the show works, with the coaches building up teams of ten people but no more, my gut is suggesting that the later blind auditions are going to be much less fun because with fewer slots remaining there&#8217;s going to be less coach appealing to the artist and more of either Will or Danny turning round for anything they can get. This isn&#8217;t much fun. Would it be better to allow a looser upper limit and have a cutting down stage? Perhaps the contenders could be aware of how many people are on each team currently and make a strategic choice in the knowledge that going for the more popular coaches means a lower chance of making it through to the next round? Something like that.<\/li>\n<li>Yes, the singing quality was very good, but I found it didn&#8217;t hold my attention for the full 80 minutes. And let&#8217;s not forget that 50 of those 80 minutes were shots of Jessie J hovering\u00a0her hand over her\u00a0button and then sighing, and then hovering some more. And then sighing again. And then hovering.<\/li>\n<li>As a production I think\u00a0it does manage to blow fresh air into a stale genre. I question whether it felt exciting, and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ll be going out of my way to watch it, probably until the next round. However I was chatting to my mum earlier and she liked it, so there we are.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The question is should <em>The X Factor<\/em> be running scared? <em>TXF<\/em> now has a few major problems, exacerbated by the fact that <em>The Voice<\/em> has hit the ground running. It&#8217;s been a largely successful formula for ten years and if it changes things now it looks like they&#8217;re only doing it because they&#8217;re scared of <em>The Voice<\/em>. People have been saying for years they should switch things up a bit, that it would be a good idea if the mentors could perhaps take an act from each section to represent them. If they had thought about it they could and should have bought this in\u00a0last year with the new judges. Similarly they could have wholesale nicked the idea of the artists choosing which judge to work with, it could have been brilliant (and, as a added bonus, it would give\u00a0more of a &#8220;it&#8217;s all about the talent&#8221; vibe even if it isn&#8217;t) and it would have had a massive headstart on <em>The Voice\u00a0<\/em>as a UK concept but unfortunately that window has closed &#8211; it would look like a rip-off. It now sounds like this year is going to be full of tediously worthy\u00a0&#8220;REAL music, yeah?&#8221; types and I&#8217;m not entirely convinced that&#8217;s what I want to watch, I think there are ways to balance a more\u00a0credible direction and keep the elements of panto. Unfortunately the time for the best ones has gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yeah it was alright. I watched the first ep on catchup this evening, I didn&#8217;t come into it with many preconceptions &#8211; I&#8217;m well aware of the Dutch original, and I&#8217;m well aware of the success the US version\u00a0has had and I know how they work but I haven&#8217;t watched them &#8211; reality singing contests\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=5483\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pLcmt-1qr","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}