American Idol

Just when you thought there was no point ever switching on the television again... along comes American Idol.

I love American Idol. The population of the United States, calculated in July 2007, was 301,139,947. For the same month, the population of the UK was estimated to be 60,776,238. So even with my maths I can see that the US has five times as many people. Five times as many talented singers, five times as many lunatics. But then, you have to multiply that by the American Dream. Ah yes, the American Dream, that anybody from anywhere can grow up to do anything, to be the President, to be the head of a multinational corporation, to be the next American Idol. Yeah man! Come on! You can do it! NO YOU CAN'T. Because to be the next American Idol you need to be able to sing. This is not a fact that has trickled down, even after seven seasons. Nobody seems to have realised that you can't always get what you want just by wanting it a whole lot and being a good person. There's always that moment after the terrible audition where the tearful auditionee says "but my mother always told me that I have a good heart" (that's a direct quote - I have never forgotten), "everywhere I go people smile", "God loves me". Thing is, God loves everybody. It doesn't make you special and it doesn't make you talented. America seems to be full of people with a lot of hair and a lot of teeth making a lot of noise with very little reason. No, that's probably not fair. But American Idol is full of those people, praise be.

What American Idol also has is Simon Cowell, and to my delight, what Simon Cowell seems to be hell bent on this year is filling up the programme with bonkers people. It's as if, having watched the likes of Sanjaya last year go from strength to strength, that he has decided that if the programme must be stuffed with the mad, it will damn be stuffed with *his* mad. Why else put through the one-eyed tone-deaf Janis Joplin impersonator whose brightly coloured outfit has, by her own gleeful admission, "been making people laugh all day"? It's as if he has decided to find out just how far exactly he can push his luck, given that if he says yes, the others tend to agree, no matter who is doing the singing. (If Randy says yes, the auditionee always goes through too, because Paula always says yes if somebody else says yes first. In fact, if Paula ever had to give her opinion first I think it would actually kill her.)

My other favourite thing about the show (OK, there are quite a few more favourite things, which we can discuss week by week) is when someone comes on looking like the top Google Image search result for 'bizarre', and you are bracing yourself for HORROR and they open their mouth and out comes something which is actually halfway decent. Witness the Dallas show's singing future congressman, complete with nerd specs, geeky hairdo, clip-on tie, and fulsome political ambitions. OK, so he might not actually be good enough to win it, but he's easily the match of, say, John Barrowman, which means he'd get to the final if he was in the UK. This not being the UK, he is likely to fall by the wayside a fair while before then, because one of my other favourite things about American Idol is that the people who are good are so very very good, so by the end you are actually just enjoying the singing. Witness: Dreamgirls's magnificent Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson came SEVENTH. I'd like to see her in a singing contest against Same Difference and that short kid who won X Factor this year.

There are a few weeks left of audition shows before the fun of the knockouts start (here's hoping that Cat Deeley will not be providing those pointless interstitions that proved the lowlight of last year's run). To join in the fun, simply switch on ITV2 at any time of the day or night and it is almost guaranteed to be being repeated.