Post by Teddy Bear on May 23, 2012 22:46:03 GMT
The format the BBC have taken for the show 'The Voice' has been successful in 30 other countries. Despite spending £22 MILLION on it, including salaries for questionable 'talent' they've made it a flop.
The BBC boss who'll plumb any depths of bad taste for ratings
By Paul Scott
Considering the mounting problems facing his flagship show The Voice, BBC1 boss Danny Cohen must feel more in need than ever of his morning meditation sessions before heading to his usual table for breakfast at The Wolseley — his favourite, celebrity-packed London restaurant.
After gambling £22 million of TV licence fee payers’ money on the singing contest, Cohen and the Beeb have got an embarrassing flop on their hands.
Following much fanfare and early ratings of close to ten million, viewing figures for the Saturday and Sunday-night talent show have sunk by almost half.
What’s more, the ailing series has become watchable for all the wrong reasons.
Saturday’s shambolic show was marred by host Holly Willoughby being forced to make an on-air apology after a female contestant was caught swearing on camera, and an embarrassing technical hitch when celebrity judge Jessie J’s microphone broke down.
Perhaps that’s why the singer has branded the programme ‘lame’ — though she seemed to be doing her best to add to the controversy by revealing the outcome of Sunday’s pre-recorded results show on Twitter two hours before it aired on BBC1.
That was just the latest setback for the besieged series, which has been at the centre of claims of commercialism following the revelation that three of The Voice’s four judges are on the roster of the huge international record label Universal. (Sales of their music have increased considerably since the show began.)
No wonder, then, that viewers are turning off in droves.
What’s particularly puzzling is that the show’s format, which the BBC bought from the independent production company behind Big Brother as a counter to ITV’s The X Factor, has been a massive success in 30 countries, including Holland where it originated, the U.S., Germany, France and Mexico.
And make no mistake, the failure of the show is a humbling episode for the fiercely ambitious — and some would say profligate — Cohen.
It is also important to remember that the colossal outlay — despite the flop, the Beeb has already committed to a second series — comes at a time when the monolithic organisation is supposed to be making 20 per cent budget cuts.
Until now, Cohen, who at 36 became the network’s youngest ever controller when he took over the reins in October 2010, had been seen as the Corporation’s golden boy and was being tipped as a contender for director-general.
But in recent days, there have been rumblings in the BBC corridors of power that the ratings slump for The Voice — which sees a panel of coaches, including Sir Tom Jones, mentoring wannabe singers — could ‘define’ Cohen’s stint as the station’s chief.
This can be translated roughly as: the knives are out for a man whose career trajectory to date has been nothing short of stratospheric.
It is Mr Cohen, of course, who has declared war on popular middle-class shows — comedies such as My Family and Outnumbered — in favour of ‘edgier’ output.
Embarrassingly, he has also been caught up in an apparent snub involving Jessie J, the self-declared bisexual singer he hired at a cost of £200,000 to appear on the judging panel of The Voice.
Earlier this month, the demanding singer is said to have refused to allow the station boss into her dressing room, telling staff to inform him that she was asleep.
Perhaps she’d taken umbrage at the fact that Cohen, who’s been hands-on with the show from the outset, has been even more generous in the fees paid to some of her fellow judges.
The Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am — who bizarrely carried the Olympic torch this week — is being paid a reported £500,000, while Tom Jones is said to be on £300,000.
The fourth judge, the previously virtually unknown Danny O’Donoghue of Irish rock group The Script, is apparently on £100,000.
The fact that The Voice is rapidly earning the moniker The Croak is a bitter blow to Cohen, whose reputation for assiduous networking is matched by his willingness to plumb the depths in pursuit of BBC ratings.
After a stint working for an independent television production company, he rose quickly through the ranks at Channel 4 before becoming head of the digital ‘yoof’ channel BBC3 five years ago.
It was while at BBC3 that he brought us such televisual barrel-scrapings as F*** Off, I’m A Hairy Woman and Hotter Than My Daughter, a make-over show where mothers insist they are more sexually attractive than their children.
Then there was Snog Marry Avoid?, a ‘make-under’ show in which women, with and without make-up, are presented to random men in the street before being judged on their looks.
During his tenure at BBC1, there have been similar controversies. Last summer, for example, there was an outcry from viewers after the Dr Who spin-off Torchwood began with a seven-minute gay sex scene before the 9pm watershed.
Getting airtime: Will.i.am, left, who carried the Olympic torch this week in Somerset has been paid £500,000 to be a judge on the show, while Scripts singer Danny O'Donoghue has only been paid £100,000 to offer his opinions
As well as dumping the popular My Family last year, he also pronounced there were ‘too many male detectives’ on TV, neatly forgetting the fact that shows such as Lewis, Sherlock and Wallander are enormously popular.
But then this was the man who once hired the drug-addled actress Lindsay Lohan to ‘investigate’ the sex trade in New Delhi for a documentary — and then had the chutzpah to say it was one of his proudest moments at BBC3.
Nor, according to those who know him, is Cohen even now prepared to admit he made a mistake in commissioning — at great expense — pop singer Lily Allen to host her own chat show on the station in 2008.
The series was panned by critics as ‘forced, desperate and painful’, and was so bad that half the studio audience walked out during the first recording.
Meanwhile, another Cohen creation, the cartoonish Phoo Action, starring actress Jaime Winstone as a crime-fighting kung-fu fan, was described by one reviewer as ‘the worst programme the BBC has ever broadcast’.
At The Wolseley, the ultra-smart establishment next door to The Ritz where the clientele regularly includes the likes of Sir Elton John, Jeremy Irons and Bob Geldof, Cohen likes to make those all-important contacts with the rich and famous.
This type of glad-handing does not come cheap, of course. Those wishing to push the boat out first thing in the morning can order the restaurant’s signature caviar omelette at £60.
Cohen is able to recoup the cost of his regular visits from his generous taxpayer-funded BBC expense account. Such perks are part of the job, as is the £260,000 salary.
And Cohen, who likes to dress casually for the office, certainly seems to have the academic credentials for the post.
After a privileged education at the £12,000-a-year City of London School for Boys, he gained a Double First at Oxford in English.
At BBC1 he has a budget of £1.3 billion, and is unlikely to pay much heed to criticism of the way that money is spent, given that he is well known among his colleagues at the Corporation for having a particularly thick skin over any questions about costs.
This thick skin he no doubt needed when viewing a particularly caustic internet spoof, made to appear as if it’s written by Cohen, entitled The Secret Diary Of A TV Controller (aged 36 and a bit).
The Adrian Mole-style diary portrays Cohen as a foul-mouthed and obnoxious careerist who is obsessed with the latest media buzzwords and who thinks nothing of stepping on others to get to the top.
The internet diary has became the talk of the television industry, with theories abounding about who is behind it. Clearly, Cohen has made several enemies during his meteoric rise to the top. While his supporters say he is ‘fiercely bright’ and a ‘team player’, his detractors describe him as arrogant and ruthlessly ambitious.
He is also derided behind his back for his endless use of meaningless jargon — he once described BBC3 as being like ‘a young dolphin’.
Another source of ridicule is his rather nerdy use of the ‘thought map’, which helps him collate ideas and which he had pinned up in his glass-walled office on the sixth floor of Television Centre in West London.
One aspect of his life that he has not sought to broadcast is his continued involvement in the fan club of the ageing Welsh new wave rock band The Alarm.
Before launching his career in TV, Cohen acted as a roadie and general dogsbody for the group, which had a minor hit in 1983 with 68 Guns. Since then, he has gone on to organise 14 annual reunions for fans of the group, at such venues as Pontins holiday camp in Prestatyn, North Wales.
Rather embarrassingly for the television high-flyer, the group’s entourage still know him by the affectionate nickname of Scooter, after the bespectacled backstage gofer from The Muppet Show.
None of which exactly fits with Cohen’s reputation for being half of one of London’s most influential media couples.
For several years, he has lived in Bohemian splendour in fashionable Primrose Hill with glamorous Professor Noreena Hertz, a Cambridge economics don and high-profile campaigner.
The blonde Ms Hertz, who is seven years older than her boyfriend and a dead ringer for Hollywood actress Renee Zellweger, is described as the ‘self-appointed It-girl of the anti-globalisation movement’.
She has also been hailed by the influential Harper’s Bazaar magazine as ‘one of the most powerful women in Britain’.
Like Cohen, she is known as a fearsomely accomplished networker who counts among her high-profile friends Bono, Bill Clinton, Bob Geldof and Nick Clegg’s lawyer wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez.
Although acknowledged as being hugely bright, Ms Hertz, who was a contemporary of Clegg at £18,000-a-year Westminster School in London, has come in for criticism from her fellow academics, who say she likes to ‘move from one high-profile cause to another’.
She has also tried to carve out a TV career for herself. Five years ago, she fronted a Channel 4 documentary, The Million Pound Footballers’ Giveaway, in which she attempted to persuade Premier League players to give a day’s salary to hard-up nurses.
After setting herself the target of £1 million, she succeeded in raising little more than £200,000. Meanwhile, the programme sparked a backlash after some nurses branded it ‘patronising’.
Not that Danny Cohen himself has exactly shied away from ruffling feathers.
While he was the Channel 4 executive in charge of Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, the reality show became gripped by a ratings- boosting race row over Jade Goody’s attacks on Indian actress Shilpa Shetty.
What Lord Reith would have made of it all is another matter.
Read more:
Danny Cohen has gambled £22million of licence payers' money on ratings flop The Voice
Viewing figures for flagship show have plummeted by a half
Saturday's show marred by Holly Willoughby apologising for contestant swearing
Voice format has been successful in 30 other countries
Show is humbling for BBC boss Cohen
By Paul Scott
Considering the mounting problems facing his flagship show The Voice, BBC1 boss Danny Cohen must feel more in need than ever of his morning meditation sessions before heading to his usual table for breakfast at The Wolseley — his favourite, celebrity-packed London restaurant.
After gambling £22 million of TV licence fee payers’ money on the singing contest, Cohen and the Beeb have got an embarrassing flop on their hands.
Following much fanfare and early ratings of close to ten million, viewing figures for the Saturday and Sunday-night talent show have sunk by almost half.
What’s more, the ailing series has become watchable for all the wrong reasons.
Saturday’s shambolic show was marred by host Holly Willoughby being forced to make an on-air apology after a female contestant was caught swearing on camera, and an embarrassing technical hitch when celebrity judge Jessie J’s microphone broke down.
Perhaps that’s why the singer has branded the programme ‘lame’ — though she seemed to be doing her best to add to the controversy by revealing the outcome of Sunday’s pre-recorded results show on Twitter two hours before it aired on BBC1.
That was just the latest setback for the besieged series, which has been at the centre of claims of commercialism following the revelation that three of The Voice’s four judges are on the roster of the huge international record label Universal. (Sales of their music have increased considerably since the show began.)
No wonder, then, that viewers are turning off in droves.
What’s particularly puzzling is that the show’s format, which the BBC bought from the independent production company behind Big Brother as a counter to ITV’s The X Factor, has been a massive success in 30 countries, including Holland where it originated, the U.S., Germany, France and Mexico.
And make no mistake, the failure of the show is a humbling episode for the fiercely ambitious — and some would say profligate — Cohen.
It is also important to remember that the colossal outlay — despite the flop, the Beeb has already committed to a second series — comes at a time when the monolithic organisation is supposed to be making 20 per cent budget cuts.
Until now, Cohen, who at 36 became the network’s youngest ever controller when he took over the reins in October 2010, had been seen as the Corporation’s golden boy and was being tipped as a contender for director-general.
But in recent days, there have been rumblings in the BBC corridors of power that the ratings slump for The Voice — which sees a panel of coaches, including Sir Tom Jones, mentoring wannabe singers — could ‘define’ Cohen’s stint as the station’s chief.
This can be translated roughly as: the knives are out for a man whose career trajectory to date has been nothing short of stratospheric.
It is Mr Cohen, of course, who has declared war on popular middle-class shows — comedies such as My Family and Outnumbered — in favour of ‘edgier’ output.
Embarrassingly, he has also been caught up in an apparent snub involving Jessie J, the self-declared bisexual singer he hired at a cost of £200,000 to appear on the judging panel of The Voice.
Earlier this month, the demanding singer is said to have refused to allow the station boss into her dressing room, telling staff to inform him that she was asleep.
Perhaps she’d taken umbrage at the fact that Cohen, who’s been hands-on with the show from the outset, has been even more generous in the fees paid to some of her fellow judges.
The Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am — who bizarrely carried the Olympic torch this week — is being paid a reported £500,000, while Tom Jones is said to be on £300,000.
The fourth judge, the previously virtually unknown Danny O’Donoghue of Irish rock group The Script, is apparently on £100,000.
The fact that The Voice is rapidly earning the moniker The Croak is a bitter blow to Cohen, whose reputation for assiduous networking is matched by his willingness to plumb the depths in pursuit of BBC ratings.
After a stint working for an independent television production company, he rose quickly through the ranks at Channel 4 before becoming head of the digital ‘yoof’ channel BBC3 five years ago.
It was while at BBC3 that he brought us such televisual barrel-scrapings as F*** Off, I’m A Hairy Woman and Hotter Than My Daughter, a make-over show where mothers insist they are more sexually attractive than their children.
Then there was Snog Marry Avoid?, a ‘make-under’ show in which women, with and without make-up, are presented to random men in the street before being judged on their looks.
During his tenure at BBC1, there have been similar controversies. Last summer, for example, there was an outcry from viewers after the Dr Who spin-off Torchwood began with a seven-minute gay sex scene before the 9pm watershed.
Getting airtime: Will.i.am, left, who carried the Olympic torch this week in Somerset has been paid £500,000 to be a judge on the show, while Scripts singer Danny O'Donoghue has only been paid £100,000 to offer his opinions
As well as dumping the popular My Family last year, he also pronounced there were ‘too many male detectives’ on TV, neatly forgetting the fact that shows such as Lewis, Sherlock and Wallander are enormously popular.
But then this was the man who once hired the drug-addled actress Lindsay Lohan to ‘investigate’ the sex trade in New Delhi for a documentary — and then had the chutzpah to say it was one of his proudest moments at BBC3.
Nor, according to those who know him, is Cohen even now prepared to admit he made a mistake in commissioning — at great expense — pop singer Lily Allen to host her own chat show on the station in 2008.
The series was panned by critics as ‘forced, desperate and painful’, and was so bad that half the studio audience walked out during the first recording.
Meanwhile, another Cohen creation, the cartoonish Phoo Action, starring actress Jaime Winstone as a crime-fighting kung-fu fan, was described by one reviewer as ‘the worst programme the BBC has ever broadcast’.
At The Wolseley, the ultra-smart establishment next door to The Ritz where the clientele regularly includes the likes of Sir Elton John, Jeremy Irons and Bob Geldof, Cohen likes to make those all-important contacts with the rich and famous.
This type of glad-handing does not come cheap, of course. Those wishing to push the boat out first thing in the morning can order the restaurant’s signature caviar omelette at £60.
Cohen is able to recoup the cost of his regular visits from his generous taxpayer-funded BBC expense account. Such perks are part of the job, as is the £260,000 salary.
And Cohen, who likes to dress casually for the office, certainly seems to have the academic credentials for the post.
After a privileged education at the £12,000-a-year City of London School for Boys, he gained a Double First at Oxford in English.
At BBC1 he has a budget of £1.3 billion, and is unlikely to pay much heed to criticism of the way that money is spent, given that he is well known among his colleagues at the Corporation for having a particularly thick skin over any questions about costs.
This thick skin he no doubt needed when viewing a particularly caustic internet spoof, made to appear as if it’s written by Cohen, entitled The Secret Diary Of A TV Controller (aged 36 and a bit).
The Adrian Mole-style diary portrays Cohen as a foul-mouthed and obnoxious careerist who is obsessed with the latest media buzzwords and who thinks nothing of stepping on others to get to the top.
The internet diary has became the talk of the television industry, with theories abounding about who is behind it. Clearly, Cohen has made several enemies during his meteoric rise to the top. While his supporters say he is ‘fiercely bright’ and a ‘team player’, his detractors describe him as arrogant and ruthlessly ambitious.
He is also derided behind his back for his endless use of meaningless jargon — he once described BBC3 as being like ‘a young dolphin’.
Another source of ridicule is his rather nerdy use of the ‘thought map’, which helps him collate ideas and which he had pinned up in his glass-walled office on the sixth floor of Television Centre in West London.
One aspect of his life that he has not sought to broadcast is his continued involvement in the fan club of the ageing Welsh new wave rock band The Alarm.
Before launching his career in TV, Cohen acted as a roadie and general dogsbody for the group, which had a minor hit in 1983 with 68 Guns. Since then, he has gone on to organise 14 annual reunions for fans of the group, at such venues as Pontins holiday camp in Prestatyn, North Wales.
Rather embarrassingly for the television high-flyer, the group’s entourage still know him by the affectionate nickname of Scooter, after the bespectacled backstage gofer from The Muppet Show.
None of which exactly fits with Cohen’s reputation for being half of one of London’s most influential media couples.
For several years, he has lived in Bohemian splendour in fashionable Primrose Hill with glamorous Professor Noreena Hertz, a Cambridge economics don and high-profile campaigner.
The blonde Ms Hertz, who is seven years older than her boyfriend and a dead ringer for Hollywood actress Renee Zellweger, is described as the ‘self-appointed It-girl of the anti-globalisation movement’.
She has also been hailed by the influential Harper’s Bazaar magazine as ‘one of the most powerful women in Britain’.
Like Cohen, she is known as a fearsomely accomplished networker who counts among her high-profile friends Bono, Bill Clinton, Bob Geldof and Nick Clegg’s lawyer wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez.
Although acknowledged as being hugely bright, Ms Hertz, who was a contemporary of Clegg at £18,000-a-year Westminster School in London, has come in for criticism from her fellow academics, who say she likes to ‘move from one high-profile cause to another’.
She has also tried to carve out a TV career for herself. Five years ago, she fronted a Channel 4 documentary, The Million Pound Footballers’ Giveaway, in which she attempted to persuade Premier League players to give a day’s salary to hard-up nurses.
After setting herself the target of £1 million, she succeeded in raising little more than £200,000. Meanwhile, the programme sparked a backlash after some nurses branded it ‘patronising’.
Not that Danny Cohen himself has exactly shied away from ruffling feathers.
While he was the Channel 4 executive in charge of Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, the reality show became gripped by a ratings- boosting race row over Jade Goody’s attacks on Indian actress Shilpa Shetty.
What Lord Reith would have made of it all is another matter.
Read more: