Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Next Best Thing: appreciation time

One major omission from my recent monthly telly review was the rather wonderful "The Next Best Thing", an American TV lookalike contest which has recently been running over here on Living TV and reached its conclusion last week.

Thought the calibre of contestants on this was far superior to the recent (and rather rubbish) BBC effort "The One and Only". After a series of brilliantly entertaining auditions and a couple of semi-finals, the final line-up was revealed. The finalists included a brilliant Frank Sinatra, Robin Williams, Little Richard, Barbra Streisand, Tina Turner, two Elvises (Elvii?) and some non-singing comedy acts - Lucille Ball, George Bush and Paris Hilton.

Many of these acts are already appearing on the professional tribute circuit and that's no surprise as they were mostly excellent.

In the end the viewers decided that their favourite impersonator was "Heartbreak" Elvis (as opposed to "Blue Suede" Elvis) however we thought that Ol' Blue Eyes was robbed.

Credit also to the hilarious judging panel whose comments during the auditions had us in stitches - certainly a big change from the usual Idol/X Factor bores with all their usual cliched, scripted remarks.

I really hope that there will be another series of this show as it was very entertaining - you can't really say that about many of the tired reality talent shows on TV at the moment.

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