Saturday, 7pm,
ITV
When I first heard about this I thought “that sounds compellingly awful”. I think it’s the title more than anything else, which evokes Butlins more than primetime ITV.
But here we are. What we have is sort of Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes but in reverse – celeb dresses up as iconic pop star, apparently mimes a tune (if what I’ve read is correct they don’t even sing) and then three teams (Diversity, Coronation Street and daytime television) of celebrities try and guess who it is behind the make-up. Jonathan Ross presides.
Who knows, perhaps it will be better than it sounds.
The best thing was the break bumpers; I haven’t heard Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” for far too long.
Being fair, the video walls and big-budget set were fun. At heart, this really is the Celebrities Walk Through A Door that Brig has been talking about from time to time for years. Needed more celebrities.
Format rights for Celebrities Walk Through A Door still on sale. Call me ITV!
Not awful, it’s blandly competant light entertainment about fifteen years too late.
If it was a bit weirder it could have come out of South Korea.
I think it needed to be much quicker getting to close-ups.
Yes, that was my main comment. The direction was overly coy – and in a bad way, as it meant the celebs had an advantage over the viewers which is not the right way around.
Shame about Diversity being a spare wheel before the final act. Would’ve made more sense having a duo as the last ones on, for which you get double points (but only if they weren’t related, natch).
Or Thailand.
cnet suggest (and I would put a link to the suggestion here, but the auto-moderator might jail this comment) YouTube’s “most viral” clip this year was this clip from The Mask Singer season 2 of someone singing a Thai song while dressed as, apparently, an oyster. I can sort of get this; if you want to do a show like The Voice where you judge a singer on their singing rather than their performance but don’t want to have to pay for the rights for the spinning chairs, this is a decent way of doing it.
I look at this the other way. Everyone, to a rough approximation, likes the spinning chair rounds on The Voice and the rest of the show doesn’t have much reason to exist. Perhaps a round of spinning chairs to whittle down the singers to 40 or 48 could be followed by a round of masked singing, using some very similar principles, to whittle down to rather fewer still? It would surely be less derivative than what they have at the moment.
I don’t mind the concept, but unsurprisingly it’s full of ITV stars, which means that it’s pretty difficult to guess any of the stars if you don’t watch much ITV.
I mean, the Dolly & Kenny stars were a couple that, according to Wikipedia, had a short-lived ITV daytime show in 2014. Just how long has Guess the Star been sitting on the shelf?
They appear on This Morning quite a lot (apparently). I had no idea who they were either.
Yes I had to Wiki them as well.
2.96m/14.7% for this I’m reading, which is a pretty average light entertainment rating these days.
I finally got around to watching this, I think it’s decent enought. Certianly not as bad as the original announcement made it sound. I don’t think ITV will commission a series, but I feel occasional specials are likely.