The sound of desperation
The BBC are helping Andrew Lloyd Webber find a star for The Sound of Music, but they're wasting their time, says Dermot Bolger
Eventually with the help of alternative therapy and alcohol I have been able to publicly admit that the first record I ever purchased was Rolf Harris's Two Little Boys. But until now I was never able to talk about the first pirate video I ever purchased, from a decidedly shady skinhead at closing time outside the Drake Inn in Finglas in 1981. Producing the brown envelope from under his coat, he promised a concoction of schoolgirls, Nazis and goats. He was true to his word. Reaching home I hit the play button on the video and spent the next two hours watching The Sound of Music.
Andrew Lloyd Webber will soon unleash a new West End version of The Sound of Music upon the world. I am not privy to how he intends to procure his Nazis and goats, but he and the BBC are determined to make a song and dance about how he finds his schoolgirl. In How Do you Solve a Problem like Maria? (BBC1, Saturday, 6.50pm) he begins his epic quest for a new star, aided by a panel of "experts" who audition two hundred girls (whittled down from six thousand) to find the ten girls who will enter Webber's magic land and be voted on by the public. If present trends continue, soon more people will vote to evict Big Brother contestants and would-be Marias than will vote to elect Prime Ministers. Martin Cullen might be wise to abandon all thoughts of electronic voting and simply let the nation pay to do so by text.
Over a decidedly staged-looking lunch, Webber told his panel that all previous productions of The Sound of Music had cast Marias who were too old. The hushed commentary (or as hushed as Graham Norton can be) told us that by Webber taking "the outrageous risk" of seeking a new star he would shock theatrical Britain to its core, while the great man himself insisted that they needed to find someone "fresh, exciting and original". It never seemed to occur to Mr Webber that if you are a talented, original-thinking eighteen year old girl the last thing you'd probably want to do is star in The Sound of Music.
A worst fate can befall girls that age however; they can wind up as a club rep cleaning up vomit on binge-drinking holiday islands. Club Reps: The Workers (UTV, 11.30, Monday-Wednesday) follows the unexciting lives of young reps on an island where, despite only possessing two streets – Bar Street and Club Street – most people still can't remember where they were last night. The camera work made Mr Webber's lunch look unstaged. I would like to say that Club Reps is the only TV programme where people slowly blink awake alone in locked bedrooms with their boss outside banging on the door, unable to get in, despite the fact that, miraculously, a film crew has already gained entry to the room to record the "awaking". However, the same thing happens on Sky "reality" programmes every night too.
Not that Sky could be accused of being ageist. If ITV's Club Reps can be explained by the amount of semi-naked young bodies on display, OAPs on ASBOS (Sky One, 11pm, Thursday) showed that tabloid television can be an inclusive medium by showing old age pensioners also behaving disgracefully. It felt like the realisation of Monty Python's sketch about gangs of granny muggers. Sky was even inclusive in showing that you can have "best of" countdown shows that don't even feature humans, with TV's Greatest Cars (Sky One, Saturday 9pm) where the hi-tech Bat Mobile was beaten into fifth place by the three wheeled motorised asset belonging to the Trotter family from Only Fools and Horses. Mr Bean's mini was pipped by the white striped car of Starsky and Hutch, which proves that there is no accounting for taste.