Post by Inside Australian Idol on Oct 31, 2003 23:50:40 GMT 10
Stars in their eyes
November 1, 2003
Soon after 8pm on Monday, Australian Idol host Andrew G announced that 21-year-old Guy Sebastian had to leave the comfy couch. In this latest and slightly softer variation on being voted off the island or evicted from the house, the small afro-haired church singer nervously bounced across the stage to await his fate.
The format of the Monday night "eviction" episode is an extraordinarily drawn-out affair, even by the standards of commercial television, so much so that Marcia Hines admitted to the Herald that she and other judges often "want to vomit".
Yet, equally, it has a tension and drama about it which has undoubtedly connected with a huge slice of the Australian public. Broadcast live in front of an enthusiastic studio audience - many of whom have queued for hours to get in - last Monday's Idol brought Channel Ten more than 2 million capital city television viewers. Equally significantly, 1.4 million votes were phoned and SMS messages sent in, claimed as an all-time Australian record.
Idol's blending of talent quest and game show - which has whittled a claimed 10,000 would-be singing stars down to just three - is dominating conversation in schools, trains, universities and workplaces like little else on television in recent years.
Its appeal appears to be across a wider range of age and demographic groups than that of Big Brother or Survivor. It has unveiled some real talent and has a multicultural diversity unlike almost anything else on commercial television.
Having to leave the couch signalled that Guy was one of the two contestants who had received the lowest number of votes for his performance on the Sunday show.
The contestant who would join him would be announced, like most things, "after the break". Only one of them would continue.
As TV viewers were treated to yet more commercial plugs, the studio audience fell silent. Even though Guy had a 50 per cent chance of surviving, there were sobs and hugs - on stage and off. So strong is the connection between the performers and the audience that Idol has forged, it was almost as if someone had died.
It took another on-air segment to learn that Guy was to be joined by Fijian-born Sydneysider Pauline Curuenavuli ("Paulini"), who had thus far defied claims made by another contestant that no black girl could win a show called Australian Idol.
Guy - who has a Malaysian background - survived, Paulini sang her swansong and departed amid more tears and a glum silence, even among those carrying "Guy to Win" signs.
IDOL is an unlikely hit, its basic conceit already well covered by three local series of Popstars on Channel Seven. A marketing blitz ensured a strong start for Idol, but ratings dropped away. There was major concern at Ten and Grundy Television, which is producing the show. Yet it has powered back, partly because - unlike Popstars - the format builds tension right until the last minutes of the last show. The remaining episodes are likely to produce record-breaking ratings.
The voting aspect has been labelled by one academic as no less than a "reclaiming of popular culture" and is cited by the show's executive producer, Stephen Peters, as a lynchpin of the show's success. "Survivor is voting people out, Big Brother is voting people out. This is aspirational. You vote for people ... to say 'I want you to continue, I like what you do and so I'm going to vote for you.' For people at home, that is really empowering."
The democratic process has been remarkably kind to Channel Ten. The top 12 included six males and six females. The final six maintained the boy, girl balance - and provided a fortuitously broad geographical spread, representing Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, country NSW and New Zealand (Rebekah LaVauney arrived here at 18 years of age). And all three remaining contestants have been forced off the couch in the past three weeks.
Conspiracy theories abound. This week, the Herald was forwarded an email by someone explaining the finalists had been decided in advance, and that two relatives of contestants had logged 8000 votes between them.
Channel Ten confirms that there is no maximum number of votes - and at 55 cents a time, that's hardly a surprise. However, a spokesman, Steve Murphy, says an independent company tabulates the results and they are then signed off as "correct and fair" by Ernst & Young. Ten executives can monitor the results as they come in, but Murphy is adamant: "We don't rig the votes."
Idol has three judges playing very defined roles: 1970s star Marcia Hines (nurturing mother of our musical youth), record company executive Ian "Dicko" Dickson (hard-nosed industry type) and teenybopper idol-turned-producer Mark Holden (buffoon).
Dickson is head of marketing at BMG Australia, which has the rights to record the final 12 contestants, and the highly quotable Englishman may survive as a media personality longer than any of the contestants. He has proved a publicity ace, particularly with his remark that Paulini needed to lose weight if she wanted to wear that dress.
The Green Left Weekly was among those outraged, if nothing else highlighting the breadth of debate. In Dickson's "admission" that "the music industry ... tortures women for money", writer Karen Fletcher was able to see parallels with drug companies failing to produce cheap drugs to deal with AIDS in Africa.
Dickson insists his comment wasn't scripted. It was merely a statement of commercial reality.
"I had a view on Paulini and she's not a tiny, tiny girl," he told the Herald this week. "As I would say to all our artists, you need to dress appropriately to your size. If I didn't say it, I would have been doing a disservice to the show, and to her ultimately."
Hines, a black American who moved here in 1969, is delighted by the show's multicultural mix and believes a rejected finalist, Cle, was wrong to say a black girl couldn't win. "When you are angry and young you lash out [but] the Australian public voted me, through TV Week, Queen Of Pop three times. Paulini and I are about the same colour."
Peters concurs. "At times this show has looked like SBS. It hasn't been by design ... it shows people are voting on talent."
CONTESTANT Robert Mills ("Millsy") is back in Melbourne after failing to make the top four. But the 21-year-old rock singer believes his Idol fame will mean he won't have to go back to his job, unpacking and scanning forms for a data processing department.
He says Idol works because "there's no talent shows like there used to be", and because the contestants have more to offer than those in Big Brother. "Instead of having people with ADD going into a house, they have people that are talented."
Mills says the show has changed his life - during a shopping trip in Chapel Street on Monday, schoolgirls screamed and as many as 50 people stopped to talk - and he believes a meeting with a manager this Monday will "basically plot out the rest of my life".
Unfortunately, enduring fame and reality television are not often fellow travellers. The final Popstars winner was solo act Scott Cain. His musical career went down with a bullet and he now hosts a children's show on cable TV. The members of Scandal'Us, formed from Popstars II, quickly vanished; the Popstars I band produced only two members (Sophie Monk and Katie Underwood) still on the public radar.
Ian Dickson believes Idol will nonetheless produce a star that shines on. "The person who wins this competition is the person who has engaged the public for the longest amount of time, and has created an impression that has really fascinated the public. A significant proportion of those people will be attached enough to part with $25 for the winner's album in November.
"Basically this is a fairytale and fairytales exist within a certain logic. You have a journey, you win, you get a No.1 single, you get a No.1 album and you get a lot of these awards and you go on and have a career. There are never any guarantees ... but that's the script we've written for ourselves."
The script also includes an avalanche of merchandise: an audition songbook, a board game, a DVD of the early auditions, a chart-topping cast single (the tautological Rise Up), a finalists' cast album, karaoke machines and more.
John Penn, Grundy's head of marketing, says there will probably be a concert tour over the summer, "carrying the brand with it over into the next year, when we'll make a second series of the show and go through the whole process again".
Professor Catharine Lumby, director, media and communications at Sydney University, says Idol has smartly capitalised on the fact people no longer want someone else choosing and handing down pop acts. "To some extent it opens a window to bypass the taste-making and control that a very narrow group of people exercise. I think this might be where we see reality television evolving, opening the door to ordinary people, a platform for real talents."
Real talent, however, is no guarantee of a happy ending. Not only do the stars of these shows tend to fade quickly, they often end up in debt because recording and marketing costs are deducted from their earnings. "That's nothing to do with the competition," says Dickson. "It's to do with the nature of record contracts.
"I kid you not when I say 80 per cent of what we find, market and record fails. You could do an audit of any major record company in Australia of their local signed artists and I guarantee you a large proportion of them would be ... owing the record company money."
Doesn't that take the gloss off the fairytale? "It's a fairytale as much as you want to buy into it," he replies. "Obviously, the flipside of that is if the fairy princess wants to lift up her skirt, you're going to see her business. That's the way it goes. It is a business, obviously."
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/31/1067566081267.html
November 1, 2003
Soon after 8pm on Monday, Australian Idol host Andrew G announced that 21-year-old Guy Sebastian had to leave the comfy couch. In this latest and slightly softer variation on being voted off the island or evicted from the house, the small afro-haired church singer nervously bounced across the stage to await his fate.
The format of the Monday night "eviction" episode is an extraordinarily drawn-out affair, even by the standards of commercial television, so much so that Marcia Hines admitted to the Herald that she and other judges often "want to vomit".
Yet, equally, it has a tension and drama about it which has undoubtedly connected with a huge slice of the Australian public. Broadcast live in front of an enthusiastic studio audience - many of whom have queued for hours to get in - last Monday's Idol brought Channel Ten more than 2 million capital city television viewers. Equally significantly, 1.4 million votes were phoned and SMS messages sent in, claimed as an all-time Australian record.
Idol's blending of talent quest and game show - which has whittled a claimed 10,000 would-be singing stars down to just three - is dominating conversation in schools, trains, universities and workplaces like little else on television in recent years.
Its appeal appears to be across a wider range of age and demographic groups than that of Big Brother or Survivor. It has unveiled some real talent and has a multicultural diversity unlike almost anything else on commercial television.
Having to leave the couch signalled that Guy was one of the two contestants who had received the lowest number of votes for his performance on the Sunday show.
The contestant who would join him would be announced, like most things, "after the break". Only one of them would continue.
As TV viewers were treated to yet more commercial plugs, the studio audience fell silent. Even though Guy had a 50 per cent chance of surviving, there were sobs and hugs - on stage and off. So strong is the connection between the performers and the audience that Idol has forged, it was almost as if someone had died.
It took another on-air segment to learn that Guy was to be joined by Fijian-born Sydneysider Pauline Curuenavuli ("Paulini"), who had thus far defied claims made by another contestant that no black girl could win a show called Australian Idol.
Guy - who has a Malaysian background - survived, Paulini sang her swansong and departed amid more tears and a glum silence, even among those carrying "Guy to Win" signs.
IDOL is an unlikely hit, its basic conceit already well covered by three local series of Popstars on Channel Seven. A marketing blitz ensured a strong start for Idol, but ratings dropped away. There was major concern at Ten and Grundy Television, which is producing the show. Yet it has powered back, partly because - unlike Popstars - the format builds tension right until the last minutes of the last show. The remaining episodes are likely to produce record-breaking ratings.
The voting aspect has been labelled by one academic as no less than a "reclaiming of popular culture" and is cited by the show's executive producer, Stephen Peters, as a lynchpin of the show's success. "Survivor is voting people out, Big Brother is voting people out. This is aspirational. You vote for people ... to say 'I want you to continue, I like what you do and so I'm going to vote for you.' For people at home, that is really empowering."
The democratic process has been remarkably kind to Channel Ten. The top 12 included six males and six females. The final six maintained the boy, girl balance - and provided a fortuitously broad geographical spread, representing Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, country NSW and New Zealand (Rebekah LaVauney arrived here at 18 years of age). And all three remaining contestants have been forced off the couch in the past three weeks.
Conspiracy theories abound. This week, the Herald was forwarded an email by someone explaining the finalists had been decided in advance, and that two relatives of contestants had logged 8000 votes between them.
Channel Ten confirms that there is no maximum number of votes - and at 55 cents a time, that's hardly a surprise. However, a spokesman, Steve Murphy, says an independent company tabulates the results and they are then signed off as "correct and fair" by Ernst & Young. Ten executives can monitor the results as they come in, but Murphy is adamant: "We don't rig the votes."
Idol has three judges playing very defined roles: 1970s star Marcia Hines (nurturing mother of our musical youth), record company executive Ian "Dicko" Dickson (hard-nosed industry type) and teenybopper idol-turned-producer Mark Holden (buffoon).
Dickson is head of marketing at BMG Australia, which has the rights to record the final 12 contestants, and the highly quotable Englishman may survive as a media personality longer than any of the contestants. He has proved a publicity ace, particularly with his remark that Paulini needed to lose weight if she wanted to wear that dress.
The Green Left Weekly was among those outraged, if nothing else highlighting the breadth of debate. In Dickson's "admission" that "the music industry ... tortures women for money", writer Karen Fletcher was able to see parallels with drug companies failing to produce cheap drugs to deal with AIDS in Africa.
Dickson insists his comment wasn't scripted. It was merely a statement of commercial reality.
"I had a view on Paulini and she's not a tiny, tiny girl," he told the Herald this week. "As I would say to all our artists, you need to dress appropriately to your size. If I didn't say it, I would have been doing a disservice to the show, and to her ultimately."
Hines, a black American who moved here in 1969, is delighted by the show's multicultural mix and believes a rejected finalist, Cle, was wrong to say a black girl couldn't win. "When you are angry and young you lash out [but] the Australian public voted me, through TV Week, Queen Of Pop three times. Paulini and I are about the same colour."
Peters concurs. "At times this show has looked like SBS. It hasn't been by design ... it shows people are voting on talent."
CONTESTANT Robert Mills ("Millsy") is back in Melbourne after failing to make the top four. But the 21-year-old rock singer believes his Idol fame will mean he won't have to go back to his job, unpacking and scanning forms for a data processing department.
He says Idol works because "there's no talent shows like there used to be", and because the contestants have more to offer than those in Big Brother. "Instead of having people with ADD going into a house, they have people that are talented."
Mills says the show has changed his life - during a shopping trip in Chapel Street on Monday, schoolgirls screamed and as many as 50 people stopped to talk - and he believes a meeting with a manager this Monday will "basically plot out the rest of my life".
Unfortunately, enduring fame and reality television are not often fellow travellers. The final Popstars winner was solo act Scott Cain. His musical career went down with a bullet and he now hosts a children's show on cable TV. The members of Scandal'Us, formed from Popstars II, quickly vanished; the Popstars I band produced only two members (Sophie Monk and Katie Underwood) still on the public radar.
Ian Dickson believes Idol will nonetheless produce a star that shines on. "The person who wins this competition is the person who has engaged the public for the longest amount of time, and has created an impression that has really fascinated the public. A significant proportion of those people will be attached enough to part with $25 for the winner's album in November.
"Basically this is a fairytale and fairytales exist within a certain logic. You have a journey, you win, you get a No.1 single, you get a No.1 album and you get a lot of these awards and you go on and have a career. There are never any guarantees ... but that's the script we've written for ourselves."
The script also includes an avalanche of merchandise: an audition songbook, a board game, a DVD of the early auditions, a chart-topping cast single (the tautological Rise Up), a finalists' cast album, karaoke machines and more.
John Penn, Grundy's head of marketing, says there will probably be a concert tour over the summer, "carrying the brand with it over into the next year, when we'll make a second series of the show and go through the whole process again".
Professor Catharine Lumby, director, media and communications at Sydney University, says Idol has smartly capitalised on the fact people no longer want someone else choosing and handing down pop acts. "To some extent it opens a window to bypass the taste-making and control that a very narrow group of people exercise. I think this might be where we see reality television evolving, opening the door to ordinary people, a platform for real talents."
Real talent, however, is no guarantee of a happy ending. Not only do the stars of these shows tend to fade quickly, they often end up in debt because recording and marketing costs are deducted from their earnings. "That's nothing to do with the competition," says Dickson. "It's to do with the nature of record contracts.
"I kid you not when I say 80 per cent of what we find, market and record fails. You could do an audit of any major record company in Australia of their local signed artists and I guarantee you a large proportion of them would be ... owing the record company money."
Doesn't that take the gloss off the fairytale? "It's a fairytale as much as you want to buy into it," he replies. "Obviously, the flipside of that is if the fairy princess wants to lift up her skirt, you're going to see her business. That's the way it goes. It is a business, obviously."
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/31/1067566081267.html