The X Factor is to get its first all-singing rival when the BBC’s The Voice arrives with confirmed judge Jessie J, but is this latest dose of reality wailing a bellow too far?

It may have taken them eight series of the X Factor to find a suitable rival – one that doesn’t revolve around former MPs and Waterloo Road actors doing the cha cha cha to pop hits – but the BBC will finally attempt to steal a slice of the reality ratings pie from ITV with the transmission of global singing contagion The Voice.

The X Factor USA

Finally spreading to the UK, The Voice’s format will be familiar to anyone who has seen 30 seconds of television in the last decade as a panel of four celebrity judges search for ‘the next big thing’ (or an equivalently trite phrase), but with a peculiar twist – you can’t actually see the contestants.


Not content with diluting musicianship down to the ability to cover a popular Adele track functionally, The Voice UK will take it a step further than The X Factor and ask participants to perform as a silhouette behind a screen - purportedly to distil talent down to it’s most crucial component but in reality stripping away all of the interesting bits like personality, appearance, emotion and movement to make it nothing more than a faceless and nauseating dose of melisma.

Later rounds will see the contestants unmasked and the show will revert to the uniform mento, vote, cry format - and haven’t we seen this too many times before?

The well-Voiced Jessie J may prove a coup for the show as the first installation on the judging panel, but the Beeb are arriving to the reality karaoke party a little too late in taking on long-established ITV monolith The X Factor.

While dark lord of pop covers Simon Cowell continues to draw huge audiences in the UK his expectations on ratings for the US version have fallen far short of what was predicted and fellow reality monstrosity Big Brother has suffered a huge wane in interest since it downsized to its new Channel 5 home.

It remains to be seen whether the The Voice will resonate around the country or fail to make itself heard.