Tag Archives: Danny O’Donaghue

The Voice Live: week three

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So the show continues, and has responded to complaints that it is getting boring by becoming a bloodbath, and also showing off Holly Willoughby’s cleavage. The end of the series is only a few weeks away and we still have 16 contestants to whittle down to just one winner. So this weekend both Team Will and Team Tom lost half their team.

If you just want to know who was voted off the show this week then click below.

Show spoiler »

This week Adam Isaac, Joelle Moses, Frances Wood and Matt and Sueleen left The Voice.

 

The first act was Leanne Mitchell, who makes me think of Karren Brady from The Apprentice. She is singing ‘I Put a Spell on You’ and kept bursting into tears as the song helped her to get back together with her boyfriend. She did well, but she isn’t Ruth Brown who is clearly the favourite from Sir Tom’s team so she doesn’t matter much.

Team Will’s first act to sing was Frances Wood with ‘Show Me Glove’, but she was wearing the world’s largest tutu which sort of distracted from her voice. Sir Tom clearly felt the same way as her performance reminded him of Star Wars.

Third act up is Matt and Sueleen, who have so far gained from The Voice experience that Matt is now known for more than just looking a bit like Gandalf. They performed ‘Everything but the Girl’ and it sounded a bit off; this was put down to them singing without being able to look at one another for the first time ever. Mostly I think it was a poor song choice.

Controversy arose when Team Will’s Joelle Moses revealed that she had started to prepare a Celine Dion song to sing on the show. Will.i.am looks disappointed and urges her to change her mind. Instead Joelle goes for ‘Stronger’ and all viewers of The Voice were happy that they didn’t need to sit through a Celine Dion song. However, when she was walking round the stage her voice wobbled and Will’s only comments were excitable nonsense about the stage.

Next up was Ruth Brown, and no matter what she did it was obvious that she was getting through. She sang ‘Next to Me’ and I thought was very good, but she does manage to slur her words together. No matter what though she is in the final, I bet you.

From now on Will has discovered that the huge studios for the show is mostly composed of screens and so during Tyler James’ performance are several pictures of Tyler’s head also singing the song like some cloned backing choir. Again this really distracted from the song, which was apparently ‘Sign Your Name Across my Heart’ but was a bit too high for anyone to really register.

In a way to add personality to these people, who were only important because of their voice Adam Isaac is now being put forward as the attractive one. However, this didn’t work properly because Adam has a fiancée who they talk to about this craze of random women fancying her man. Anyway he sings a Radiohead song and unfortunately he isn’t significant enough to get much further.

And the final performance of the night went to Jaz Ellington. We got to be with him and his wife as they visited the hospital to find out the sex of their unborn baby, which is an odd way to get to know someone better. When he is up on stage there is a massive picture of him and his wife behind him and soon most of the studio is weeping because of the emotion in the song.

This week the teams also got to spend more time with their mentors as they had a group performance. Tom took centre stage as his team did rendition of ‘Hit the Road Jack’ and his singers all worked together quite well. Will took a different approach as he got his team in to produce their song. The only problem is he made them wear suits that made them look like referees at Wimbledon, as well as wearing driving gloves that he designed.

The overall problem with The Voice is the suspense is ruined by having to wait until the next day for the results, and the fact that it is very obvious which contestants the judges prefer. This makes this whole charade a bit pointless. This means the only real hope is that next week the same bloodbath happens to Team Danny and Team Jessie, meaning the judges will be left with the contestants they really like meaning the competition will start to mean something again.

In the meantime you can catch up with every that has happened on The Voice over on BBC iPlayer.

The Voice UK live: week two

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Last week on The Voice saw Team Will and Team Tom compete against one another and resulted in Sam Buttery and Sophie Griffin being kicked off the show. This week it was Team Jessie and Team Danny’s chance to flaunt off their team’s voices.

Just want to know who was booted off this week, then click below.

Show spoiler »

Hannah Bernley and Ruth-Ann St Luce left.

Toni Warne from Team Jessie started the night off with a rendition of Proud Mary. I think she is the only person to have got through who is actually what The Voice set out to do. She has a great voice and is good in the competition regardless of her alopecia. Having said that she is fond of pulling weird faces and odd stances when she is singing, which is slightly off-putting.

Team Danny’s first sacrifice was Max Milner, who is noted for his hat wearing skills. He has a guitar and then the judges talk about him and his voice for about ten minutes when they could have summed it up with “good”. Instead we get to hear about how people will be begging to go to Max concerts and so on. Overall the judges comments need to add something or need to get shorter.

Next up is Jessie’s wildcard choice, Ruth-Ann St Luce. She is the wildcard choice because she isn’t very good at staying in tune, and whenever she sings Will.i.am does the most miserable face in the world. However, Jessie seems to think she can teach the girl something. Sadly her performance was out of tune again and Will seemed very happy to point this out.

Once the judges have calmed down Hannah Berney, from Team Danny, has a go. She sings Cry Me a River and has lots of dancers on stage, which seems to infuriate Jessie because this show is all about the voice, so backing dancers are unnecessary. The judges then squabble about this for ages until the host, Holly Willoughby, tells Hannah to leave the stage to stop them from arguing.

Jessie’s next act, Vince Kidd, has made a brave move — he is singing an Elvis Presley song in front of Tom Jones. Vince does lots of singing the song in a way that you don’t expect it to be sang, but inevitably we lead to Sir Tom Jones talking about the times he worked with Elvis. I moan, but to be honest Sir Tom going down memory lane and name dropping is the best bit of the show.

The theme this week seems to be get your singers to sing songs that you wouldn’t expect them too as Aleks Josh pretends that he is Michael Buble and Cassius Henry goes the complete opposite of his usual style R’n'B by singing a Coldplay song. Likewise David Julien is liked by the judges for his rocky voice so he sings some slow song with high vocals.

The only thing really notable about Jessie’s last act of the night, Becky Hill, is that her microphone had a massive cord and she was then given the task of running around the entire stage.

The final act of the night, Bo Bruce has one of these weird voices where you know that she is singing but you can’t quite tell what she is singing. Also she reminds me of a rebellious version of Clare Balding. Anyway she sings a Kate Bush song and Will.i.am declares that she is what every single version of The Voice across the globe has been looking out for.

So after all that we have to get ready to say farewell to another two acts. Unexpectedly Team Danny is quite strong so he might make a few bizarre faces when choosing who to send home. As for Team Jessie there are a few weaker voices in her team, so we shall have to see what happens.

The results show is on Sunday at 7.15pm on BBC One, and in the meantime you can watch the second live show of the series on BBC iPlayer.

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The Voice goes live: week one

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The contestants have been whittled down, a massive studio has been built and presenters Reggie Yates and Holly Willoughby have spoken more than a sentence already — this means The Voice is now live.

Here at TV Talk we weren’t that impressed with the auditions stage as for a show about the voice we were hoping for some hideous looking people who were exceptionally talented. Instead it was just normal looking people, and in fact most have ordinary voices.

Once each coach had 10 people in their team, meaning there was a whooping 40 voices taking part, the show moved into a battle situation. Each team paired up people in their groups who they thought sounded most alike and made them battle for their part in the show with their voice. Essentially it was one weekend of shows to halve the number of contestants. It was a bit dull, and a bit shouty.

So coming through to the live shows there was still 20 contestants, and if they were to all perform in one evening that would take some serious commitment from everyone. Instead this weekend just saw Team Will and Team Tom take to the stage.

To find out who was eliminated this week click below.

Show spoiler »

The first live show saw Sam Buttery from Team Tom and Sophie from Team Will eliminated.

One of the problems I have with the show, because there have been so many people on stage there are only a few people that I actually remember. It doesn’t help that because this show is about the voice (in case you had forgotten) they don’t have an emotional back story, or personality to remember them by. So each week I have to try and remember who they are, until they sing and I realise I don’t actually much like their voice and forget about them until they are on screen again.

The show starts with the coaches singing a U2 song together. They are all trying a bit too hard, sounds like they are all singing a different song, and Danny is still amazed as to why he is singing with Tom Jones.

The rest of the show alternates between contestants from Team Will and Team Tom. The first contestant up to perform is Joelle Moses who sang a Mary J Blige song, and was quite good. Team Tom’s first live offering was Sam Buttery, the larger, camp man with lovely coiffured hair. He sang ‘A Little Respect’ by Erasure, and it wasn’t that great to be honest. However, he was only criticised for was having backing dancers as they distracted from him.

Back to Team Will with Frances Wood. She has buff men on the stage whilst she sings, but this isn’t called a distraction. She also managed to tan herself so much she made herself look yellow. All these comments are distracting from the fact that I can’t remember what she sang, or what she sounded like.

Tom Jones’ next contestant is Adam Isaac who had been given a Foo Fighters song to sing, but is struggling with it. However, they show him in rehearsals picking up a guitar and this helped him to sing the song. When he performs the song live he is actually quite screechy, but according to the coaches this doesn’t matter because it is a rock song. He’s told to move around the stage more, but this is obviously dangerous as Adam fell off the stage earlier in attempt to do this.

There are already some clear favourites and this is the case for will.i.am’s next artist Jaz Ellington. Not only does he have quite a cool name, but he can also sing very nicely and it is with these skills he could go far in this competition.

The last batch of performers include Leanne Mitchell, who I don’t really remember except that she looked a bit like The Apprentice’s Karren Brady. At 17-years-old Sophie Griffin is the youngest in the competition, and seems to do no wrong as the judges all wish they were as talented as her when they were her age. Team Tom’s Matt and Sueleen are the only duo left in the competition. They are a couple and do that annoying thing of pretend hatred in the relationship. And Tyler James, the hipster version of Jedward, who knew Amy Winehouse.

And finally Ruth Brown who has an ability to belt out songs, even though she has never had proper singing lessons. She is sweet and the only one I really like, but each week they dress her up as if she is a toddler. But it is about the voice and her performance has left the judges in floods of tears.

The live show was fun, best stage of the show so far, but long. The BBC have taken the same approach to The Voice as they do with Strictly Come Dancing, Holly Willoughby presents most of it, like Bruce Forsyth, and then cuts to Reggie Yates backstage, like Tess Daly. Even announcing the results on Sundays as a prerecorded show, like they do with Strictly.

The thing is the show seems to think that voting is dirty, no big thing was made about the phone lines being open and voting time is only half an hour. The judges also seem to think that criticism is a bad thing, making it all nicey nice and means no one really learns anything.

Next week Team Jessie and Team Danny are performing, so we can cut down on more people before another change to the format of the show. In the meantime you can catch up with the series so far on iPlayer.

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The Voice: Nothing to shout about

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It’s taken me a long while to get my thoughts together about the Beeb’s bizarre and puzzling new Saturday night show, The Voice.

I mean, I get that it’s about people’s voices- not about their looks but about the VOICE, not about who they know or the clothes they wear but the VOICE. Yes the BBC drove that one home with about 500 references in the first five minutes, but so much else was left unclear.

The judges listen to a contestant

What do they win, how were these people selected to compete, how are the judges actually going to help them and who the heck is the annoying bloke in seat number 4? After a bit of googling (and then re-googling as I promptly forgot) the answer to that last conundrum was revealed to be Danny O’Donoghue from the Script. We’re still not entirely sure what they win- a recording contract I think.

The basic concept with the blind auditions is nice, if rather naive, as in the end all these acts are going to end up in the same image obsessed industry as the X Factor contestants and other pop star wannabes. Also, it was slightly flawed by the fact that these people had been ‘invited’ to perform by producers who would have known what they looked like. It was nice to have purely decent singers but for the concept to work the auditions should have been open.

Consequently we had a few token chubbies (nothing drastic), a couple of slightly geeky guys and a gorgeous lady with alopecia, alongside a string of attractive contestants, including an ex-member of boy band Five and a willowy, pretty 17 year old. None of these were Susan Boyle moments that bashed prejudiced ideas or allowed someone really different a chance in the spotlight. And let’s face it, like it or not, once we get into the live shows, looks are going to come into play, same as ever.

The show itself is an odd affair. One noticeable thing is that despite Holly Willoughby’s much publicised move from Dancing on Ice to the Beeb, she only conducts interviews backstage, there is no presenter as such to stop the judges bickering, shut up contestants who blabber on, or generally move the show along. It’s all left, rather awkwardly to the judges to manage things between them and results in a slow pace.

The judges themselves sit facing away from the stage in giant red thrones, designed to act like waltzers, which spin round and light up with ‘I want you’ if they press their button to like an act. It’s all painfully gimmicky and usually ends up with the judges copying eachother whether the verdict’s yes or no anyway.

If the contestants have a choice of mentors (though quite what Will.i.am, Jessie J, Tom Jones and Danny Thing are actually going to do for them remains a mystery) they get the hard-sell, with Tom and Will.i.am name dropping left right and centre, Danny waving his arms and openly begging and Jessie J going on about ‘the music’. The contestant then picks Jessie J because she’s their total favourite and they’d already decided when they made the choice to cover Price Tag, that she’s the one for them.

Indeed, the stand-out moment of the whole show was not an inspirational performance, but when one poor fool in a daft hat chose Danny as his mentor.

In short, I found The Voice was entertaining but alas, for all the wrong reasons. To figure out what you think of the show catch it every Saturday on BBC One at 7pm or watch it online on iPlayer.

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