Media review: Fame Academy
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Your support makes all the difference.Over the past couple of months, while Fame Academy has been screening, optimists have pointed out that the series has failed to attract the huge ratings of other reality TV shows.
The sickness has passed, they said; voyeurism and schadenfreude have gone out of fashion. The sad truth is that voyeurism and schadenfreude are always in vogue; it's just that, sometimes, the public appetite gets sated.
The even sadder truth is that this isn't one of those times. This unholy hybrid of Pop Idol and Big Brother has been gaining audiences – a week ago, it had a perfectly respectable 6.3 million viewers, and in last night's final, 6.9 million telephone votes were cast.
It is worrying that a public-service broadcaster has been so eager to exploit public weakness, and even more worrying that they pumped this stuff into children's brains. The BBC's children's programming has featured regular updates on the progress of the academy's pupils, along with the message that they were competing for "the ultimate prize – fame".
Fame, in this case, comes in the shape of a million-pound record deal, together with a flat in Notting Hill. What sort of message will this give our youth? I didn't always sound like Colonel Blimp, by the way; television has done this to me.
Over the last 10 weeks the 12 contestants were whittled down by public vote. Last night, the final three sang for the big prize. The bookie's favourite was David Sneddon from Glasgow: a fresh-faced lad in the Gareth Gates mould, his presence emphasised that shows like this reward the least offensive – vocally and physically – rather than the most gifted.
The result was put in doubt by a late flurry of betting for the Northern Irish songbird Sinead Quinn. Lemar Obika, labelled "the new Marvin Gaye" in the tabloids, never seemed likely to trouble either of them.
And so it proved. At the end of the first half, Obika was out, leaving Quinn and Sneddon to sing some more. "I Don't Want to Talk About It" was Sneddon's final offering; and, quite honestly, I don't much want to discuss it myself. Sneddon won; everybody else lost.
Peter Bazalgette, who helped to bring reality TV to British screens, was appointed last week to the Conservative Party's Commission for Democracy, to see if he can get people to vote for politicians as eagerly as they vote for TV trash. But if Fame Academy is the sort of thing we want to vote for, should we be voting at all?
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