Well, I just watched it. In some ways it wasn't as bad as I dreaded and in so many ways so much worse.
It was literally, laugh-a-minute car crash telly. It sucked all the way from concept to practice via appalling scripting.
I do get annoyed when Katherine Jenkins is constantly described as an opera singer. Surely, she has veto over the scripts, but she just sits there and lets it go, even though in a subsequent interview, when it suits her, she'll deny ever having described herself as that.
Just for the record, Katherine Jenkins has never performed in an opera in her life. She has never appeared in a professional concert singing without a microphone. She has recorded and sings in concert a small number of arias from operas. Her technique and interpretation will not stand comparison against hundreds of lesser-known singers who actually do perform in operas.
The whole exercise is utterly pointless. I can see the idea behind it, but someone really needed to think it through properly. What are they trying to prove? Either that singing in opera is easy, anyone can do it. Or else it's so hard that despite intense coaching, even people with a track record of performing and in some cases with decent singing voices can't do it satisfactorily?
If you get some of them making a decent fist of singing an isolated aria into a microphone, so what? That's just the start of it. And in any case, I didn't notice any of them actually working from the score, just learning it by ear. If the point is to prove it's difficult, then the end result is caterwauling and anti-music.
If the objective is some stupid misguided attempt to bring opera to a ITV Friday night audience, that isn't going to work, either. There's no point saying that opera is about love, sex and death if you then get a bunch of amateurs failing to put any meaning into arias disconnected from their dramatic context and failing even to put surtitles on the screen. If you are sincere in that objective, you televise the very best singers performing well-rehearsed concerts, even if you're too scared to televise an actual opera with its sex and death and passion.
Why on earth should anybody without prior knowledge have a clue about the debauchery and cynicism of the rapist Duke of Mantua just from hearing a tune that's used for pasta sauce adverts? How can an audience judge whether the singer has conveyed the meaning of the song if they don't have any hint about the meaning? How can anybody fall in love with a song of any genre when it's badly sung? It wouldn't have taken much effort to have a brief description of the context; sub-titles would definitely have been a good thing.
I think, like Maestro, it may eventually demonstrate which of the contestants has innate musicality and which has a poor sense of pitch. But so what? They have their careers and their fans and they have demonstrated that they are good, or at least, successful, at what they do.
As for the panel, what can I say? Katherine Jenkins was out of her depth, even though she's pretty good at pretending. It's like someone's told her about her poor breath control and dodgy phrasing and it's now embedded in her head. And that's what she's going to keep going on about. She came over like a not-very-cool prefect on display at Speech Day and wanting the assembled parents and governors to know how seriously she takes her responsibility for the younger girls.
Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen's comments were bland and inconsequential. Meatloaf is on something. I found him very entertaining even though he really was talking total nonsense. Rolando Villazón was trying to be fair and critical at the same time; he had the 'audacity' to criticise Danny Jones from McFly (who was probably almost the worst of the lot) and got booed by a crowd of demented hysterical McFly groupies who don't have a clue. The trouble is, Rolando is speaking from the heart and from years of experience, but in the end, what does it matter?
And as for the pop singers. Darius came over the most instinctively musical although with zero personality. Alex James was the only one who seemed to care about the character he was portraying - and did a splendid tuneless patter. As for the rest, some clearly have decent basic voices, but in general I think they all did worst in the areas where they ought to have done best - keeping to the tune and on pitch, and projecting some sort of personality, some sort of stage presence, that je ne sais quoi where the performer connects with the audience, irrespective of what the performance is. But it's all relative: not one of them sang in a way that could honestly be described as adequate.
Alan Titchmarsh was less annoying than I feared he would be. Jimmy's admitted to a sneaking admiration for Mylene Klass even though he didn't know who she was when he met her last May.
But the single most annoying thing, even more annoying than Katherine Jenkins was that for each singer, they were permitted to sing the opening phrase of their aria or song, and then the audience broke into applause and cheers. What was that - tune recognition? Do people seriously have to shout out loud if they recognise a tune? Bizarre. And as for those McFly fans, oh dear. I'm sure it said on the ticket application that no one under sixteen was allowed in. The way they screamed, I'm sure it was a bunch of 13-year-olds. And he wasn't any good. Bland, below pitch, and far too pleased with himself.
And then to cap it all, we had Camilla Kerslake singing. She is some 'soprano' discovered by Gary Barlow. I hadn't heard until I caught some of the Titmarsh show in the doctor's waiting room the other day. I have to say, dear reader, she actually makes Katherine Jenkins look polished; her high notes are thin and wavery, and although I suspect she was singing in English I simply couldn't tell a word she says.
Next week, Katherine Jenkins will be performing. The sado-masochist in me hopes it will be Una voce poco fa
