A couple of weeks ago, I quickly (you'd never guess) pulled together the below diagram to explain the soaraway success of BBC1 talent show The Voice UK, but also predicting its imminent decline:
You will have worked out it is far from scientific but it spread far and wide on Twitter and the majority of feedback suggested it summed things up pretty neatly. I wasn't the only one who felt as though I'd gone from watching and enjoying the show to merely rubbernecking the latest television car crash to brighten up our Saturday evening tweeting (and The Voice UK certainly got people tweeting - for better or worse).
But as the producers of Red Or Black can confirm, even a Saturday night show which is so bad it's captivating starts to lose viewers pretty quickly.
By this past weekend I had stopped watching - as had more than two million others. The volume of tweets about the show was also down 28 per cent.
Ever since the format changed from the refreshing novelty of the blind auditions to the painful spectacle of the 'battle round' the mood in the Twitter camp noticably shifted. So where did it go wrong?
Murder
First of all people realised the battle round allowed judges to cull all the contestants they'd accidentally picked up in the earlier round, when all they had to go on was the voice (thus making something of a mockery of the show's entire pitch). Secondly, the battle round forced two contestants to sing off against one another while simultaneously ganging up to murder a number of popular songs.
Inevitably the battles became no more than two people shouting at each other in desperation. If the instantly forgettable contestants had been allowed to kneel at the judges' feet and just scream "PLEASE PICK ME OR I DON'T KNOW WHAT I MIGHT DO!!" it's easy to imagine several would have taken that option (though they would inevitably have dragged the "DO!!" out for at least 10 seconds of self-indulgent warbling).
Then, after the battle stage came the clumsily diluted version of The X Factor, even down to the awkward, poorly cobbled-together group numbers ahead of a Sunday night results show during which Holly Willoughby reminds us the results are "in no particular order" (© Dermot O'Leary).
And while the judges (coaches, if you must) are either charmingly inoffensive (Will.i.am and Tom Jones), channel-hoppingly irritating (Jessie J) or almost entirely anonymous (the Irish one who sits on the end just nodding) they seem incapable of saying or doing anything that won't now expedite the show's decline, not least because for all their unconvincing, overplayed 'hardest decision ever' rhetoric they seem about as bothered as the rest of us.
So can The Voice UK hang on to enough viewers long enough to secure a second series and a much needed overhaul? It seems likely. After all, even Fame Academy - the BBC's previous, shortlived attempt to take on ITV's talent shows - managed a second series before it vanished into the abyss.
The talk in today's tabloids was of a rescue package involving Kylie Minogue and Cheryl Cole being brought in to paper over the widening cracks. I can only speak for myself when I say such predictable tinkering won't be nearly enough to get that interest curve heading in the right direction any time soon.
Did you, or anyone else for that matter got annoyed by the apparent production cheat during battle rounds? I mean other than it was very edited in between, while singing, the candidate that won was given more volume towards the end. You did notice didn't you?
Posted by: Jack | May 14, 2012 at 07:33