Each March, as predictable as awful weather and drunks wearing green, Canadian Idol auditions blow into the national capital. And, in three months time, the most-watched domestic television show will surely follow, as the yin to Hockey Night in Canada’s wintry yang.
The Idol calendar really starts in January, though, when close to 40 million people on this continent tune into American Idol, the world’s most famous karaoke contest. Together, the two versions are a ratings behemoth which dominates television screens in this country for the better part of the year.
American Idol is now in its seventh season, and the Canadian version is about to start its sixth. Each year, thousands of hopefuls have lined up for hours to sing in front of a tired, critical, and, on occasion, intoxicated panel of judges.
From this mass of dreamers, though, only a couple of the American winners have amounted to anything approaching commercial or critical success.
The Canadian Idols all but uniformly shuffle from singing national anthems at hockey games to releasing singles on Christmas compilations, quickly and thankfully fading into obscurity.
Take, for example, Brian Melo, last year’s winner. Less than a year after some 2.3 million Canadians watched him out-warble Jaydee Bixbee in the fifth season’s finale, Melo has the marquee gig of opening for Faber Drive at Mavericks Bar (capacity: 200) on Rideau Street this month.
What can account for the huge discrepancy between TV celebrity and third-rate recording artist?
Logically, the best contestants in the country would have gone furthest in the show within the first couple of seasons. The talent pool in cities such as Regina or St. John’s can’t practically sustain five or six seasons worth of television-ready young singers, let alone those in Whitehorse or Moncton.
So viewers are now stuck with a batch of now-eligible 16-year- olds and entrants who weren’t quite good enough to compete against Kalan Porter (second album sales: 30,000) or Ryan Malcolm (current job: lead singer of remotely popular Low Level Flight) five years ago.
If those two couldn’t sustain the Idol bump for longer than a couple of summers, then Melissa O’Neil (current job: ensemble cast member in the Toronto staging of Dirty Dancing) and Eva Avila (debut album sales: a third of Malcolm’s 170,000) won’t have much more luck.
Cracks in the foundation have started to show.
Ratings have started to dip for the series in both the US and Canada, after peaks in 2003-04. The plots have remained the same, the cast has changed little save for a yearly rotation of new guest stars, and maybe, just maybe, there’s a limit to how many tone-deaf renditions of “I Will Always Love You” viewers are willing to suffer through.
Like all amateur hours, though, Canadian Idol is an inexpensive way to fill up the prime time slots during the drought of American television produced in the summer.
As long as its producers can bring in a few extra royalty cheques for billionaire show creator Simon Fuller (manager of the Spice Girls, S Club 7, and David and Victoria Beckham, among others), Idol will exploit the hopes and dreams of young singers for advertising revenue.
This tradition is far from new. Star Search filled the same void in the 1980s (winners include Linda Eder and Sam Harris … never heard of them? You’re not alone). Ditto for The Original Amateur Hour, which ran from 1934 until 1970 and is best known for creating Pat Boone’s career.
For the thousands of contestants, dozens of finalists, and the handful of winners, however, the dreams of celebrity remain as fleeting as the precious few seconds one has to sing their way into the nation’s short-term memory.