The greasy reality game

TVReview:The springs in the old television casting couch were well and truly tested last weekend with the finals of two elongated television auditions for West End musicals, Grease Is the Word and Any Dream Will Do, both shows vying for the limited attention span of an early Saturday night audience, and once again banking on the public's telephone voting skills and seemingly inexhaustible patience for weeping and sweating young performers pleading for their big break.

A lucrative marriage between the two forms, which secures the producers of both the theatre and television shows "bums on seats", it may be; I, however, have to admit to watching the programmes through gritted eyelids and to feeling less than generous-spirited about lining Simon Cowell's or Andrew Lloyd Webber's already robust pockets. In fact, sucking the liquefied droppings of Joseph's herd of goats through the armpit of Danny's leather jacket (after he's been down in the sand with Sandy) would be marginally more appealing. But vote the public did, and have been buying tickets for the forthcoming productions.

Grease Is the Word was a gaudy and overwrought show that, despite having the attraction of a wilting daisy chain and producing a finale that crackled with all the tension of a pair of mismatched ankle socks, nevertheless allowed its producers (Cowell's Syco TV) to walk away with two vaguely recognisable leads, and sold £6 million (€9 million) worth of tickets.

The fun for the audience was, of course, watching minor talents being dragged into major cerise spotlights and left there to caterwaul their way through a bunch of songs that you thought you had buried with your leg-warmers and Olivia Newton-John hairbands. Eventually, the blonde led the bland, and a dirndl-skirted Susan McFadden (sister of Brian) was crowned "Sandy" (she can sing, which is more than can be said for the other female finalist) and a bloke called Danny B (who I found entirely indistinguishable from the other stuffed crotches that strutted their stuff in this paltry concert) was voted "Danny" (at least he should have no problem knowing who the choreographer is screaming at).

SIMULTANEOUSLY, AS DANNY and Sandy were warbling their total devotion, the Beeb's casting couch was proving itself somewhat less creaky, stuffed as it was with three boyos, the finalists of Any Dream Will Do, who, in hearty states of coiffure and mighty tight suits, were giving their all for Joseph. Presented by Graham Norton, who is beginning to look a little exhausted as he dutifully lusts after every quivering piece of wannabe posterior Auntie throws at him (one gets the impression that the BBC won't rest until they have Norton, potentially a far more dexterous host than this, in flagrante delicto with Tinky Winky), the Joe show saw the three chaps totter towards the much-coveted golden cloak under the tutelage of a flamboyantly silk-shirted Lloyd Webber.

As part of this hysterically high-camp outing, the producers of this infinitely more enjoyable rubbish flew the three finalists out to Lloyd Webber's Balearic pad for a bit of guidance, counselling and chocolate cake, where all three looked moodily seaward as they contemplated their euphonious futures, their naked torsos glittering in the Majorcan sunlight.

The winner was not Keith the Tesco Tosca (worked the tills, sweet voice) or lugubrious Lewis (pretty boy with the streaks) but 25-year-old Lee, a curly-headed West End understudy deemed a safe pair of hands for Lloyd Webber's delicate instrument.

The fun didn't stop there, however: by midweek, the ubiquitous talent show was beginning to display a virus-like tenacity as it spread its tentacles across the schedules.

BY FAR THE most low-rent, tacky shot horse of the week's offerings in an insanely overcrowded market was Britain's Got Talent, a warted, oleaginous beast presented by nifty Nit-n-Dic/Ant-n-Dec over nine consecutive nights, which scraped the detritus from the underbelly of the bulging British wannabe public in an effort to find a new act to pleasure the queen in the forthcoming Royal Variety Performance. The format, now as recognisable as Simon Cowell's megalomania, was the same as usual: thousands of people queuing up with their pulsing hope for a baptism of humiliation from a panel of judges that included the nauseatingly pampered Piers Morgan, who looked like a sweatily decadent 21st-century emperor in his prim and overpriced suit.

On the night, the road show went to Manchester, the usual crowd poured in to face both the panel and a stuffed and raucous auditorium, some contestants clutching sturdy handbags and fragile egos, others coaxing singing poodles, some with guitars and demeanours of quiet desperation, one whose act solely involved sticking pegs on his face, others with tuneless electric organs and awful unrecognisable impersonations - and one skinny old man in a purple dress and a blond wig with a pop-sock tied to his chin to stop his wattles rattling while he attempted a Kylie Minogue rendition.

There was an extraordinary, almost shockingly Dickensian quality to the extravaganza, as if the TV talent show has somehow become a prosthetic peg on the welfare state, a route out for the disenfranchised, the despairing and the depressed, which, in its own uniquely awful way, made it compelling viewing.

Cowell, the show's creator, is a shrewd operator: there was not a single moment when he wasn't pulling our strings, whether it was the "sensitive Ant/Dec" interview of the little body-popping boy looking for fame to help his family make ends meet, or the sweet-voiced young black man with guardianship of his deceased brother's young children, who sang his beautifully simple song of survival. We are pawns in Cowell's game; we are his groundlings.

REALITY BITES. NO sooner had Cowell silenced the baying hoards than that familiar barked phrase, "You're hired", heralded the end of a boisterously enjoyable series of The Apprentice. Oh Sugar, Sugar, why did you do it? Sir Alan, eschewing the bookies' favourite, Kristina Grimes, a focused 36-year-old single mother and reverent devotee of the hirsute multi-millionaire, chose instead to award the £100,000-per-annum (€148,000) prize job to young Londoner Simon Ambrose, public school-educated son of a millionaire, card-carrying member of Mensa and all-round fun guy. Nah, it's just not cricket, Sir Alan.

It all came down to the final task: two "landmark" conceptual buildings were presented by the candidates to a roomful of estate agents and property developers who, perched on spindle-backed chairs, judged the wavering aesthetic and financial potential of the edifices while Sugar evaluated his finalists' ability to control the floor. Sugar's verdict was about backing youth over experience, it was about an ageing tycoon recognising the untrammelled confidence of a bright young thing who had yet to be bruised by disappointment, and it was also a way of confounding the expectation that Sugar always opts for a working-class apprentice, someone who, like himself, has fought their way up, rather than one of the "tossers", as he has previously defined Ambrose's particular type.

All fun and games until a different kind of reality bites and you realise that Ambrose's "prize" will actually be selling golfing breaks in Stansted for a living.

DISPIRITING AS THAT may seem (and I am prepared to accept that the instant despair the word "golf" throws me into is entirely subjective and wholly unprofessional), there are worse things. Like, for example, adult siblings sharing a childhood bunk-bed in a tiny room drowning in stuffed teddy bears and sweatshirts while their brother and two huge dogs sleep on the couch in the family living room and their father squeezes himself into the kitchen-come-smoking-room to watch gentle English sport alongside overflowing ashtrays and a noisy defecating budgie, in a house that appears stressed to the seams with the conflicting needs of its residents.

I'm an Adult, Get Me Out of Here this week focused on the lives of two symbiotic siblings, Lisa Marie and Andrea O'Reilly, who, at the ages of 31 and 23, worked together, socialised together and slept together, and were both mired in credit-card debt, car loans and duty-free cigarettes. Their lives, as shown by the programme, seemed characterised by a casual circular poverty that, while allowing them a week away in Lanzarote to stack up on the fags, never let them experience adult freedoms or enhance their expectation of what the world might offer.

The series presenter, the tenacious and sympathetic John Maguire, eventually helped these childlike women to find a home, a neat little house in Carlow, where they will swap the confines of their box-room for a long commute to their jobs and where, in exchange for independence, they will relinquish their social lives, the weekly bingo outing with their parents in Dún Laoghaire's Christian Institute.

"Daddy will miss his girls," said their mother as her daughters prepared to fly the nest. Sometimes reality is a hard station.