TV Talent Shows

Having seen the back of the dreadfully bland McDonald Brothers from ITV's "The X Factor" leaving behind the desperately untalented 1980's American stadium rock-a-like Ben, and the midget 1950's crooner in a boys body Ray, with only the Whitney-Maria-o-gram Leona having more than an ounce of talent, its time to look at television talent contests that I have liked through the ages.

And I am well qualified.

Living in our house as a child meant a relentless diet of tv talent shows, our dad was a big fan being as he was an amatuer entertainer himself. He would only visit pubs or clubs that had a "turn" on, even just a bloke playing a piano would qualify as a "turn" for him and he was a huge supporter of the CIU, the organisation that supports and publicises the phenominum of "working mens clubs" in the UK as it was in the clubs that he could indulge in his passion of grabbing a microphone at any opportunity to croon in a Sinatra stylee to the hapless audience.

And so every Monday evening at 7pm we'd all sit down with our tea (northern word for "evening meal") on our knees and tune into "Opportunity Knocks", the weekly showcase for talentless no-marks who believed, sincerley believed that they were the next Tom Jones, Engleburt Humperdink, or just a bloke who stands there in front of the nation clad in just a pair of yellow swimming trunks and while they try and eat their tea he flexes various muscles in time to a cha-cha.

Presented by the ever optomistic Hughie Green who never had a bad word for any of his acts, even though a bad word was what most of them really needed to break their bubble head dreams, Opportunity Knocks was open to anyone who could pass their audition and who had at least one friend who would act as their "sponsor" and come and chat with Hughie for two minutes while the stage was prepared for the next act, banal questions such as "when did your friend discover this talent for balancing teaspoons on their nose ?" would inevitably end with Hughie asking a risque question and after receiveing the answer would stare straight into the camera with one eybrow slightly raised, clearing his throat with a "Harumph".

Our dad insisted on watching Opportunity Knocks every week for two reasons - he would often see the semi-professional acts that appeared in his beloved working mens clubs on the TV and would always remind you that he'd seen them last week "in the club", and secondly he believed that he had a knack as a talent spotter that surpassed Hughie Green's and every week would predict who would be the winner to be paraded on next weeks programme.

New Faces was ITV's saturday night premium time slot talent show for semi-pros only, but it still didn't stop the hopeless, hapless and downright zero-talent buffoons from having a go, except that on New Faces you didn't get the all-forgiving Hughie Green to fawn all over you, you got a panel of three bas'tads to tell you how fucking useless you were.

The panel varied from series to series but a couple of long serving members were Tony Hatch, an ugly little runt of a music producer who had written an performed such shite as the theme from the crap tv soap "Crossroads" and a handfull of bland ballads for his blander wife Jackie Trent - the pair of them eventually emigrated to Australia in the 1980's so that they could re-run their moderate musical success of the 1960's as Australians are generally at least 20 years behind the rest of the world in blandness.

Another constant on the New Faces panel was a woman that you would have given up a well paid job not to have worked for, newspaper tv critic Nina Myscow who seemed not to have a good word to say about anyone, ever, and yet the aspiring tv talent queued around the block to appear on the show. New Faces was the reason why so many annual Royal Variety Performances caused the Queen to leave the theatre early with their parade of hopeless, unfunny jerks who thought the whole world lay at their feet after winning one show - and of course our dad had to predict the winners of each round too.

But the king of the tv talent show, the very best of the bad bunch, head and shoulders above anything else previous or since, was the "Sky Search for a Star" competition.

The fledgling Sky tv sattelite empire was only months old when they decided that their new Sky One channel needed a tv talent show to break the monotony of back to back 20 year old episodes of Charlies Angels, and so they commissioned Keith Chegwin to present "Search for a Star" and to put a slightly different edge to the programme it was audition free.

This meant that as long as you knew where the tv studio was you could simply get pissed on a sunday afternoon and turn up to do a turn on the live early evening programme. Not one single act from several series of Search for a Star ever became a star of tv and in that respect their Search for a Star was fruitless, but it was bloody hilarious while it lasted and the only must-see programme of the week.

Keith Chegwin was a perfect foil for the show but a rubbish presenter as most of the time he was unable to speak through choking back the laughter, but it didn't matter, we too were unable to see the tv screen for most of the hour long programme through our tears of mirth and joy.

The most famous of the acts to appear was "Roberts World of Magic", a gangy teenage boy in a bad 1970's tuxedo that he'd obviously borrowed off an uncle, Robert could not perform one single magic act to save his sorry life but that did not prevent his ambition to appear on national tv as a serious magician.

Tommy Cooper had done the same act a decade before of course but he was supposed to get the magic act wrong and he was looking for laughs when he got the magic act wrong - Robert was trying his best to get the magic act to work properly, its just wasn't his fault that he couldn't remember which sleeve the doves came out of or which playing card Chegwin had picked and then placed back in the pack.

The finale of Roberts act was the escapology from a mail sack.

Robert got Chegwin to handcuff his hand together then he disappeared into a large mail sack and asked a member of the audience to tie the sack up with a thick rope. The show's producer had cruelly chosen the biggest bloke in the audience to tie the knot and even as the seven foot bruiser pulled the rope tight as hard as he could all of us watching just knew that this was car crash tv at its best, there was no way that Robert could have escaped from that sack even if he'd not climbed in the sack in the first place.

After ten minutes of struggling, shapeless limbs thumping from inside the sack, all to the background music of a corny sideshow stylee organist, Chegwin decided that he had to intervene to save himself from apoplexy as he hadn't managed to breath through his laughter for the last five minutes, and even he struggled to untie the knot and had to get the burly bruiser back out of the audience to undo it properly - and yet as soon as the rope fell to the floor out popped Robert in a "ta-daaaa" pose, arms outstretched, hair tousled, face flushed bright red with effort and he stepped from the sack as if he'd done the whole escape without any assistance whatsoever.

The next day in a newspaper interview Robert declared that Chegwin had ruined his act by intervening and that he was just about to untie the knots from insde the sack himself, he may have even threatened to sue the show for ruining what was obviously a perfectly good career in showbiz - and he was right, I'd have paid with my own money to watch Roberts World of Magic again.

Wonderful TV.

Maybe next weeks X Factor should make them sing from inside a mail sack while trying to escape from handcuffs ?