TV Review

Published Monday 7 August 2006 at 17:55 by Harry Venning

Since Phantom Of The Opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber has been producing turkeys on a scale to rival Bernard Matthews and city sources speculate that he could soon be down to his last £85 trillion. Lloyd Webber is clearly desperate for a new hit musical and a return to the glory days, hence his involvement in such an obvious gimmick as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

Maria is the effervescent nun turned governess turned Mrs. Von Trapp at the heart of The Sound Of Music and this latest TV talent trawl intends to find a fresh-faced unknown to play the role in a new production at the London Palladium. There you go, Andrew, a little more free promotion for the show.

Lloyd Webber is too busy jetting around his global empire to participate fully in the casting process and his involvement here is pretty much limited to sitting at home in front of a TV the size of a tennis court, watching audition tapes and pulling faces at the performances. The actual donkey work of wading waste deep through wannabes is done by a judging panel of the show’s co-producer David Ian, vocal coach Zoe Tyler and actor John Barrowman.

The show follows the standard talent search format, complete with contrived catchphrase - “You’re not Maria!”/ “You could be Maria!” - but with one

crucial and debilitating difference. Aspiring to high-brow credibility, the programme steers clear of the deluded, desperate and dismal applicants that make the early stages of Pop Idol and The X Factor such a guilty pleasure. All those invited to audition for Maria are tediously proficient in that tortuously over trained singing style beloved of musical theatre and there was little to choose between them. Ian, who pulled rank several times as producer, simply ushered through all the prettiest girls which, as everybody knows, just isn’t the showbusiness way at all.

Eventually the panel whittled down the hopefuls to 51 - it should have been 50 but plucky, persistent Briony just wouldn’t take no for an answer - and packed them off to “Maria School”.

At which point Lloyd Webber decided to overrule the panel’s judgement and reinstate several of the discarded candidates, rendering the whole process pointless.

Similarly, Big Brother has started reintroducing evicted housemates back into the Big Brother house. Like DDT-resistant cockroaches or the heads of the Hydra, you just can’t get rid of them.

Farewell Top of the Pops, the last edition of which I meant to watch but forgot. Which, I think, says it all quite eloquently. I did, however, catch Digging the Dancing Queens, a short and sweet history of Pan’s People. Back in the early seventies, Pan’s People epitomised raw sexuality, although they themselves claimed to be unaware of the effect they had . “It was a more innocent age,” they all agreed. So innocent that any routine featuring short skirts was filmed at floor level.

As a teenager I certainly didn’t watch Pan’s People for the dancing, but nevertheless I couldn’t help notice they weren’t very good at it. But as choreographer Flick Colby explained, they had less than a week to get a routine together and this was often jettisoned two days before performance if the record slipped down the charts. Which,one suspects, must have happened quite often.

DETAILS

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? - BBC1, 6.50pm, Saturday, July 29

Big Brother - C4, nightly

Top of the Pops: the Final Countdown - BBC2, 7pm, Sunday, July 30

Pan’s People: Digging the Dancing Queens - BBC2, 11.10pm, Sunday, July 30