Pop's Ultimate Star

As someone who wrote off Dancing With The Stars as the stupidest idea for a TV show yet and predicted its dismal failure, I'm reluctant to denounce Pop's Ultimate Star as being a similarly dumb concept. An exciting new act of reality TV recycling on TV2, the show follows the Idol format but with Idol has-beens from previous seasons as well as a couple of the originl Popstars and even Tama from Shortland Street. While it's always a pleasure to have the Lummis back on the box, I think the show's concept kind of defeats one of the main attractions of the endless Idol series' - the whole zero to hero narrative of the 'average Joe' character going from audition to nationwide celebrity in ten short weeks. The appeal of Idol, I thought, lay in that the contestants were viewed and judged by the audience as 'ordinary people' rather than stars.

By using B-grade celebrities instead the show follows in the footsteps of a bunch of other reality franchises - Clebrity Big Brother, Dancing With The Stars, Celebrity Treasure Island etc. While Celebrity Treasure Island in particular has proven more popular than its original, 'talent quest' reality shows like Dancing With The Stars and Idol seem to be more successful when the contestants are amateurs - that is, the celebrities' amateurishness on Dancing With the Stars is much more appealing than the experiencd dancers on Strictly Ballroom, just as the rise to fame of the amateur on Idol is an integral part of its success. I guess time will tell whether this holds true as we follow the rise, from B-grade to B-plus-grade, of the experienced performers on Pop's Ultimate Star.