By the BBC's William Gallagher

The show has given faded pop stars a second chance

A host of former chart stars, including pop duo Dollar and soul singer and actress Michelle Gayle, take to the road in the US in ITV's new music talent show Reborn in the USA.

It is a first: a reality television series that intentionally has C-list celebrities.

Reborn in the USA has found a new format for humiliation, too, as it exploits the strange way that ex-successful people are fascinating and how mild desperation is electrifying.

"It's a no-brainer," said Tony Hadley, and it is hard to disagree.

Most, but not all, of the celebrities in this series have had more success than most of us can dream of. Yet the instant their star wanes, we write people like this off.

It isn't fair, it is schadenfreude, but with ten people trying to reclaim past glories, Reborn in the USA with presenter Davina McCall should be delicious fun.

It almost is, too.

Double act

Most of the celebrities are a surprise. Elkie Brooks and perhaps Hadley, for instance still have a following, for instance, while it is a struggle to remember what Gina G did beyond failing at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Then Thereza Bazar and David Van Day have unexpectedly re-formed Dollar yet again and are the only double act competing in the show. "It's been good to have this break," said Van Day, optimistically assuming Dollar's time out of the spotlight is over.

One celebrity is gone already, in what must have been the dream problem for ITV1: Then Jericho's Mark Shaw argued with the other stars and stormed out of the show, easily earning it twice as much press coverage as before.

Eurovision veteran Gina G is one of the hopefuls

This first episode gleefully showed playing the rock star and annoying the rest of the group. In a rare moment, we saw others drop the performance and become exasperated and human.

But we were back to a lack of self-awareness with the next backstage item: Sonia and others showed us how poor their motel accommodation was and failed to realise that this dump was the best ITV1 was willing to pay for.

The onstage performances were surprisingly weak, too, but it is hard to be sure how much was nerves and how much was the television production: the sound felt a little flat and the visuals were uniformly too dark.

The technical quality may improve over the coming weeks and so may our opinion of the celebrities as we get to see more of them under pressure.

Already Peter Cox from Go West, a last-second replacement for Mark Shaw, looks promisingly able to sing and keep a sense of self-irony too.

He has already survived the first round as the New Orleans audience saved him and everyone bar Dollar and Sonia. Now ITV1 is hoping we will phone in our millions to choose which will stay in the USA.