Keith
Urban: Happy to have snagged $3 million to appear on American Idol.
Craig Mathieson, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Ed St John has visited Los Angeles numerous times during the past
two years, and with each trip the veteran Australian music-industry executive
follows the same plan: he drives up and down Wilshire Boulevard visiting the
managers who look after some of the world's leading singers, and then he
ventures up into the hills to meet their famous clients and offer them a new
career path.
St John, who has previously overseen the Australian arms of
several multinational record labels, is a casting consultant who has become a
specialist in a new field: matching successful musicians to the television
shows that crave their status, their experience and their celebrity. His
marquee client is Channel Nine's The
Voice, the hit reality singing show whose June finale drew a
staggering national audience of more than 3.2 million people.
A major element in The
Voice's breakthrough was the wattage of its judging panel:
expatriate Nashville superstar Keith Urban; Australia's adult pop princess
Delta Goodrem; Joel Madden, the frontman for American pop-punks Good Charlotte;
and British balladeer Seal. As a group, they were strong enough to carry the
show's launch marketing; as individual coaches they won over vast ratings.
''On The Voice,
the coaches are the stars of the show,'' St John says. ''You're watching as
much for what they say as what the contestants sing.''
Whether the discipline is singing or cooking, reality competition
series have become some of the key television franchises of the past decade.
One of the things that almost invariably separates the champions from the
cancelled is the impact of the collective who pass judgment.
''It's very difficult for a show to work without the right judging
panel,'' says Margaret Bashfield, who as executive producer of MasterChef Australia is
able to rely on the trio of food critic Matt Preston and restaurateurs and
chefs Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris.
''When you watch a show you want to enjoy the interaction between
the people you're watching, and that's the special thing we have with our three
boys.''
But as the genre has evolved there's been an escalation - slow at
first, swift in the past few years - in the composition and cost of judging or
coaching panels. Some people in the televisions business call it an arms race,
and it went nuclear in 2011.
That was the year The
X Factor here in Australia replaced shock jock Kyle Sandilands with
former Spice Girl Mel B (Melanie Brown), who brought a large degree of
likeability and 75 million album sales to the series. Brown went on to co-host
another Channel Seven show, Dancing
with the Stars, and her presence on The X Factor alongside Irish singer Ronan
Keating added significant importance to the judging panel, which was then
raised further by the launch of The
Voice in America.
"There's always been a certain sort of person networks and
production companies have booked for talent shows and without wanting to insult
any of those previous people they aimed their sights a little lower - people
with an industry background or who used to be a star," explains St John.
"What changed is that there was a decision made to step it up and bring in
superstar level talent."
The US version of The
Voice put the multi-platinum likes of pop singer Christina Aguilera
and Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine in those spiffy revolving red chairs. That
show's success, and the boost it provided to its judges' careers, meant that Ed
St John was taken very seriously when he came calling on behalf of the local
production.
''Part of it is that even the biggest music acts have to be
broader in what they make their money from; they don't make it from record
sales like they used to,'' he says. ''Part of it is that these shows don't
damage the artist's credibility and, in fact, they introduce them to a huge new
audience.''
A recent two-year stint on American
Idol reinvigorated the career of Jennifer Lopez; Britney Spears is
being paid $US15 million to sit alongside Simon Cowell on The X Factor; and chefs
who successfully judge can find their reservation book quickly bulges. But
those who assemble the panels insist you have to do far more than merely
connect famous names.
''Machiavellian TV producers can cast as much as they like, but
unless there's genuine chemistry there, unless something happens that
transcends the sum of the parts, it doesn't work,'' Channel Nine director of
development Adrian Swift says. ''You also have to cast for personality - in our
case we had Delta, Australia's sweetheart, Keith was our professor, Joel was
our clown, and Seal was our alpha male.''
Bashfield says her crew's MasterChef
casting stories are ''legendary'', both for the number of people and mixes
tried and the ease the chosen trio shared in front of the camera. ''It was
extremely obvious when the right combination was found,'' she adds.
Still, issues remain in getting stars in the show's field to
become nationally televised judges.
The medium's demands can be taxing, and the newly elevated can
sometimes become overexposed as they grab every subsequent opportunity.
Just how rarefied the celebrity air prospective judges have to
breathe might soon become known. The
Voice has to replace Urban, who was so impressive he was poached to
sit next to Mariah Carey on American
Idol, and Channel Ten is rumoured to be opening next year with an
Australian version of the successful British spinoff MasterChef: The Professionals.
The names being bandied around to host the latter include superstar
international chefs Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal.
St John says the dream team of potential music-show judges
includes Robbie Williams, Rihanna and Michael Buble.
''I've made the trip to Katy Perry's manager's office several
times and he's very nice about it but they say no to everyone,'' St John says.
But does the desire to net a Buble mean that mere experts no
longer have a chance to be cast regardless of ability? Bashfield is adamant
that if Preston announced himself now, he would still make the grade.
But former Australian
Idol judge Ian Dickson, a record company executive who did the
first of his five seasons on the show in 2003, doesn't believe he would get a
look-in these days.
''I doubt it,'' Dickson says. ''Putting an unknown, slightly jowly
40-year-old British bloke on a judging panel was a big call, but that was 10
years ago. The judges have to have star power now.''
Still, the judge who successfully built the ''Dicko'' brand from
scratch believes the securing of big names is just a trend, albeit a very
expensive one with no end in sight. At a certain point, Dickson says, the
viewing public's taste in judges will move on.
''The second someone breaks from the pack and does something
different and it works,'' Dickson says, sounding just like a television show
judge, ''I'll guarantee you everyone will think we no longer need superstars.''
