The Last Choir Standing
Funny thing, reality TV. So often there’s voting involved; which, as we know, can lead to all sorts of amusement. Here is television, which we have already paid for, but for which we are then asked to pay again. And since business is about selling, with potentially large revenues at stake, just how much does that dictate the format of the show? And who, exactly, does the voting?
Take BBC 1’s ‘Last Choir Standing’. A surprising package, which had the potential to drag out a series of summer Saturdays to something approaching infinity, yet which instead chose to hurtle us, all unprepared, towards the autumn schedules. The standard of the choirs as the competition progressed must have shocked many viewers, along with the breadth and scope of the musical arrangements. Witness amateur musicians of all ages, getting together for the joy of singing, passionately creating something bigger than the sum of it’s parts - choral song. It was quite astonishing to see just how far the spur of competition drove the choirs to raise their game, delivering performances and musical arrangements that would not have been out of place in a big budget movie musical.
In the season finale, we had ‘Only Men Aloud’, a Welsh Male Voice choir, singing, with no apparent irony, ‘All By Myself’; Ysgol Glanaethwy, a dynamic young mixed choir, also from Wales, performing ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana; and Revelation, the only remaining Gospel choir, who delivered a stunning version of Mcfadden and Whitehead’s ‘Ain’t No Stoppin Us Now’. If you’d like a quick precis of events, with a list of who sang what, you could visit http://www.lastchoirstanding.com/
Still, there’s no denying that part of the fun in following these Saturday Night talent fests is in predicting how the voting will work out. Not wishing to take anything away from the eventual winners, Only Men Aloud, but on the evidence available one could be forgiven for thinking that the Nation held a bias against Gospel choirs. Looking at the simply mystifying ejection of the superlative ACM Gospel choir in the semi-final, it was hard to see where they might have gone wrong. Having delivered a truly breathtaking performance of ‘Joyful, Joyful’ from Sister Act II, (the best live choral performance I can recall seeing on TV) you had to wonder, were they simply too good for this competition? You can get an idea of the impression created by hearing them live in the studio by visiting Ian Wylie’s blog post, http://blogs.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/ianwylie/2008/08/last_choir_standing.html My own theory on this is that there are in fact two ‘publics’ - there’s the viewing public, and the voting public, and grasping the difference between the two is fundamental to understanding the quirky nature of the results in TV talent competitions, which have shown a tendency to skew in favour of various minorities. The default position, for many viewers switching on the TV, is ‘I’ve paid for my license, I’ll let others pay to vote.’ I, for instance, hold rigidly to that view. Usually. But then your best intentions go out of the window when you realise that you have something in common with one of the participants - be it geography, or some other bias, and in seconds you are reaching for the phone, not once, but two, three or more times. Which in this case is just great for the BBC. Yet, for the non-voters amongst us at least, it honestly felt a little odd to witness a situation where, in the latter stages, stunning contestants were excluded one after another until only the most traditional remained. Yes, we had a winner. But did the process necessarily reveal the best choir, or merely what we British expect a choir to be like? Watching the final, I was left with the intriguing thought that a non-British audience might have voted very differently.
So, in the interests of equanimity, I would like to propose a new system - One viewer, one (free) vote. Then we could all have our say, and may the best contestant win. But it might just take the fun out of it, though…