I Can See Your Voice: What the Must Watch reviewers think
Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.
This week Scott Bryan and Hayley Campbell share their thoughts on BBC One game show ‘I Can See Your Voice.’ Paddy McGuinness challenges contestants and celebrities including Amanda Holden, Jimmy Carr and Alison Hammond to sort the singing sensations from the woeful warblers – without hearing a note.
BBC/Thames/Ray Burmiston/Matt Burlem
Scott says: “Do we care that someone can sing or not?”
Scott: "I don’t know about you, but I am just so tired of having to guess just one thing for an entire hour. A recent trend in television is constantly being kept in suspense. You spend an hour working out who is the rightful owner of a house in This Is My House. You spend weeks working out which celebrity is in The Masked Singer. Here you are forced to guess whether a set of people can or cannot sing, for an entire hour. That's it.
"I think this show is good for families (if I was 10 I would be all over this) and it's great that they're giving unsigned or new singing talent a primetime opportunity to show off their skills, especially in a non-cutthroat X-Factor style competition. It also makes you wonder: do we care that someone can sing or not? I don't particularly care.
“Beyond that, it's not bad enough to be a good guilty pleasure, nor good enough to be good either. If this was on ITV they’d have made it 10 times more ridiculous, they would have stuck in some ad’s to make it breathe, but because it’s on the BBC it’s like they have to explain themselves so much and talk about song-writing too.”
BBC/Thames
Hayley says: “It just felt mean spirited”
Hayley: "Within seconds of starting Jimmy Carr had already done that seal bark laugh, so I was already wanting to change the channel. Then we have Paddy McGuinness, with bleached blonde hair, explaining the rules over and over. I think if you have to spend this much time explaining the rules, it’s a sign this has already gone wrong. No one wants to play a board game when someone spends two hours reading the instructions out, and that’s sort of what this felt like.
“The main issue was, apart from it being horrible to watch, it just felt mean-spirited. The celebrity panel does it’s best to make a joke of it and rib each other as much as they do the contestants, but it just feels kind of mean. Their job is to work out if the singers are good or bad and to be judgemental, but it’s not in a fun or absurd way like This Is My House - which has you psychologically profiling people you've only just met to decide if they're the kind of person who would lick a sofa.
This just seems to be about the person and how they look, and it makes me cringe and a bit sad for people in the same way that Naked Attraction does, with those naked bums out under stage lights.’’
BBC/Thames
I Can See Your Voice is available now on BBC iPlayer.
Must Watch is released as a podcast every Monday evening from BBC Sounds and all other good podcast providers.
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