Live the Dream or the slightly older man's Singapore Idol

I finally watched one of Live the Delusional Dream's competition episodes last night. They have been at this for a few weeks now but I have only seen a couple of result show episodes before.

The theme was great - Remix and Rematch. Blake Lewis from the latest American Idol season would have absolutely killed this. This was breathtakingly original for a Singapore talent show.

The singing was less great. I had expected better after seeing the audition episode that aired on National Day. After all, aren't there actual professional singers competing? People who sing in clubs, lounges, cruise ships etc? Not glamorous by any means, but at least competent enough to make a living from keeping in tune? I was not expecting "pitchiness" to be a problem with this show, unlike Idol and the Superstar competitions. I can only imagine that the decent singers did not get the votes and were eliminated before these final rounds. Or that Ken Lim the judges pulled out the old "X factor" chestnut to prop up questionably gifted contestants. Or probably both.

On the whole, the soloists were better than the average Singapore Idol finalist, but not by much. Certainly, nobody was quite as scarily inept as the teen-brigade in SI2. We can all be thankful for that much but less so for the continued presence of Victor Tang and Shauna Simon. Shauna is a decent enough singer but not a particularly impressive performer. I think she should have tried out for Idol, since she's patently young enough (then I had the thought that maybe she did try out and was unsuccessful) and she's just taking up a spot that could have gone to someone over 30 years old, who could not have qualified for Idol. Victor Tang is reportedly a musician and I am sure he is good at what he does for a living. He is just not a singer. Nothing to be ashamed of; plenty of brilliant musicians cannot sing if their lives depended on it. I wish he had friends who told him to just stick to song writing and playing music. It would have spared him the embarrassment of a particularly stinging Ken Lim put-down. It would have spared us from the alarming prospect of seeing him as one of the potential Grand Finalists (looking ominously possible now, after Robert Tsunga's unceremonious and undeserved elimination).

I liked all the bands, even the ones that made cacophonous noises! I think the sound mixing and balance on this show is generally quite bad and that may explain some of the less than melodious sounds that we hear. Not that I am making excuses for the bands; there were some harmonies that missed the mark by miles, and After the Rain's instrumentalists were out of sync with each other. I still thought they sounded better than many of the bands that were on Channel U's "Superband" competition (the Grand Finals of that show was musically a disaster. Milu Ping played instruments much better than they sang and Soul was a band of dancers who should really, really, really stick to dancing. The only musically sound band in the Top 4 was J3 who sang a superb jazz rendition of Xiao Wei in the Finals, but sadly did not pull the needed votes).

Dick Lee seems to have taken on the mantle of the "nice" judge with something positive to say about almost everyone. Is he getting soft in his (physically non apparent) old age?

Ken Lim seems meaner on this show than on Idol. Maybe I did not give him enough credit on Idol. He was stingy with praise, but at least he never seemed downright nasty. Perhaps he was truly making an effort to be nice and appropriately treating the Idol youngsters with kids' gloves. On this show, he seems to be in a perpetual bad mood and barely able to be minimally civil to the contestants or the screaming audience. Actually, I rather enjoy this version of Ken Lim who has no obvious partiality for any of the contestants. He seems to have no time for the whole lot of them (barring perhaps By Definition) and his critiques are consequently unhampered by the usual need for subtle audience manipulation. It makes a nice change.