Singapore Idol - a Crock of BS

Just watched Group 3 of Singapore Idol perform. What a load of crap! No, I'm not talking about the contestants. Having taken part in my school talent-time before, coming in second, I know how they feel. There are lots of very talented singers and performers out there, who are courageous enough to sing in front of a live audience and on national TV.

What I don't like about the Idol series, not just Singapore Idol, is that THE VOTING SYSTEM SUCKS!!! The fact that any one person can vote as many times as you like totally defeats the foundation behind any voting system.

How did Nana and Beverly, 2 of those who can truly sing, got left behind while blokes like Jerry and Taufik got through? Good thing there are the wild cards, otherwise...

Back to the lousy voting system. Now, picture this;

Dude A - Super good looks, tall, dark, and handsome, extrovert and has many friends, but sings off key.

Dude B - Average looking, fair, skinny, and a little short for a guy. Quiet, but sings like an angel.

Comes the time to vote.

Dude A has 3 friends (for easy comparison) voting via SMS for him. Each of them, being young and adept at texting, sent 10 SMSes voting for Dude A. That's 30.

Dude B, being a quiet introvert, has no friends supporting him. But his performance was so impressive that he impressed many viewers, none of them know him, but they still decided to SMS once to vote for him. For simplicity, let's say 29 total strangers each voted for Dude B once, that will still only give him 29 votes.

So who goes through here? The guy who has only 3 buddies voting for him. The guy who looks good but can't sing! Now how fair is that? Of course, the producers and people behind the show knows this, but why aren't they doing anything to change it? That's right, $$$. Don't ask me how, but I don't think its hard to figure out who stands to gain when thousands, if not millions of calls and SMSes were made in such a short period of time.

During American and World Idol fever, there were already outcries over the flaws in the voting system. There are reports of phreaks who can swing the votes however they want or jam the phone lines if they want to. Softwares to turn your modem into a voting machine. And, in this report, even terrorists and the FBI somehow got involved.

And to add fuel to the fire, if what was reported by The New Paper on 15th August 2004 was true, many of the "auditions" in front of the judges were actually rigged. The really awful participants did auditioned, but not in front of the 4 main judges. Hell, they never even got through the very 1st audition for them to even meet the 4 celebrity judges. They, the celeb judges, supposedly read out scripts to suit the "occasion" so that everything will be edited and made to look as if it took place in front of them, when the actual auditioning was done by other producers/judges.

Yes, the world of entertainment and showbiz, it's all a farce. Like my father used to chide us in Cantonese, "Din-low zou hei, sor-low tai hei", meaning "the mad puts on a show, the idiots watch them". How true.