Beat It!

So the other night I got the chance to watch John de Mol’s new singing talent show Beat It! currently going out on Saturdays on SBS6 in the Netherlands (catch-up available but geoblocked).

• In it, team captains Jan Smit and Gerard Joling act as both judges and partner each to nine singers. The host is hosted by the lovely Kim-Lian van der Meij.
• For each round, one of the captains will judge three different singers. They will sing at the same time, but the captain will use the console in front of him to pick whose mic is “on” at any time.
• Over the course of the round the judge will eliminate two of the singers. As they sing, they will use the console in front of them to give each singer a warning (going from green to amber) if they don’t think they’re up to scratch.
• However if they go from amber to red then they are eliminated in crazy fashion – springboarded into a flaming pool, having a cannon fired at them so they fall into a bottomless pit, mummified, being drowned in ping pong balls, that sort of thing. There are apparently over 40 elimination methods.
• If some of them seem quite harsh that’s because they use graphical effects – the pit isn’t actually bottomless, there isn’t actually a shark in the water. That swimming pool isn’t actually on fire.
• Initially this seems like quite a fun idea – as Lewis Murphy commented when I mentioned this on Twitter, it’s 101 Ways To Leave A Talentshow. However. However. It gets surprisingly dull surprisingly quickly. Like Ejector Seat it’s concentrated on the wrong thing as the source of the comedy – because so much of it is CGI half the time we don’t get much if anything in the way of reaction, when the key to the comedy in something like this is always, always the surprised shriek.
• There are six elimination rounds, each captain finding three winners. The winners for each captain then face off against each other in a semi-final, leaving each captain with their choice of one contestant.
• Each captain then does a duet with their winning contestant, then the teams stand in a gunge tank.
• The winner is determined by a vote of the 16 eliminated contestants. The losers get gunged, the winning civilian contestant wins €10,000 and a trophy.

Like I say initially quite good fun in the Sing If You Can stylee, but I did find it outstayed its welcome quite quickly.