Have a look at the TV guide at the moment and you’ll see we’ve rolled around to that glorious part of the year where writers take a well deserved 11 months off and the schedule fills up with reality programs. Australia’s Got (An Amazingly Low Pool Of) Talent, Dancing With The (Washed Up or Never Quite Were) Stars and So You Think (People Give A Fuck If) You Can Dance and their ilk are here again to relieve us from entertainment, information or debate on the box. While the genre is mostly the fault of shows like Survivor and Big Brother, it’s the Idol franchise that I’ve been thinking about recently. Australian Idol ran for seven whole seasons. Seven! It was eventually axed in 2009 to a collective sigh of relief that temporarily tripled the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere. The conventional wisdom on Australian Idol was that the show was something between shit and fucking shit. It was an irresistibly nauseating combination of smarmy, vapid hosts and an array of young impressionable kids who, despite having spent a total of seventeen weeks out of nappies, assured us, through rivers of tears that “this is my lifelong dream and I’ve always wanted to sing and my family will be…….blah, blah friggen blah.”

Of course every now and then one of our judges would make the news, when the fat one would call someone fat or the mental one would invent a language and say something mental.

It never was quite clear to me what the judges were there to do anyway, given that contestants continuation in the competition, rather than something involving remotely mounted Gatling guns and motion sensors, was left entirely up to the viewing and text messaging public. I guess they were there to represent the industry that these kids were trying whore themselves out to. In that sense they did have it pretty much covered, with one to represent the ugly, superficial sleaziness, one to represent the lovey, superficial embraciness and one to represent, umm, I don’t know. What did Mark Holden represent? Peanuts who wear white suits and no shoes in film clips full of artificial smoke?

There is however a major problem with hating Idol as much as any rational person should. Actually there are two problems. Firstly, most of us haters actually have no real right to cast opinions in the Idol space. Idol was about pop music. Not just that, but it was about all that being a pop star entails. Hypermarketing, youth, simple vanilla songs that require no thought or interpretation have all become synonymous with the pop music industry, and Idol stepped up and held each aloft as principles as worthy and lofty as any constitution or charter. And you know what? They had every right to.

Like it or not pop music is a genre that caters to kids, mostly girls, in their pre-teen and teenage years, and it does it well. Kids hoover up pop music, propelling today’s manufactured and marketed pop stars like Katy Perry, Rihanna and Ke-dollar sign-ha into multi-media megastars. You can argue that their music, or whatever it is that you call that sound they make, is shitfully awful. And you’d have my full support, but I don’t go out and buy it. I listen to stuff that the pop star market not only doesn’t cater to, but the teeny-boppers probably think is boring and equally shit. And they’re right, but so am I.

The fact that I don’t like pop music doesn’t make it shit, any more than telling people I’m a funny guy with a big dick makes that true. So you don’t like Australian Idol. Do you like pop music? If the answer is no, then just move on, they didn’t have you in mind when they made it. Just flick over to another channel and watch some other reality show.

Secondly, the other thing Idol did, that we really do owe them a modicum of thanks for, is injecting a dozen or so new fly by night celebrities that can actually sing into the media orbit. While the judges were mostly a bunch of pubes, they did manage to weed out those who couldn’t hold a note. Admittedly some of the more spectacularly bad efforts bestowed upon their perpetrators novelty celebrity status for a week or so, but we eventually wound up with a bunch of kids who could sing quite well. Maybe the songs they would put their to name failed to have you or I camping out overnight at HMV to buy their albums, but when they were dragged onto the Today show, Carols by Candlelight or to bang out the national anthem at the Grand Final, they did a reasonably tuneful job of it. Remember how it used to be when pop stars were selected by their looks and marketability alone? Back then an auto-tune and classes in mime took care of the singing and that particular talent astonishingly ceased to be relevant in the pop music industry - until they decided to go live and all hell broke loose. At some stage pop stars will always have to sing something live, at least Idol has given us people who can.

Finally, before I finish inexplicably sticking up for the show, a quick word on the numbers. In the early days there was a lot of talk about Idol contestants taking the easy road, or the soft option into the music industry. (Yes Missy Higgins, I’m looking at you, wherever you’ve vanished to.) In the harsh light of day however, over 50,000 people auditioned for Australian Idol in its early days. The prize was one recording contract. Yes I know the exposure helped more than just the winner, and most seasons saw a couple of new ‘talents’ enter the market. Still going into it, you had not much better than a one or two in fifty-thousand chance. I’m not sure what the figure would be for the normal method of walking into a production company with a demo, but still one in fifty-thousand is a long way from a free ride. Certainly a lot worse odds than Triple J Unearthed, hey Missy?

So there, I’ve spent most of an article sticking up for Australian Idol and shitty pop music. I’m not sure what possessed me, but I’m off now for a long bath, a bit of a lie down and a listen to some good old hair metal at top volume. Ahhhh, serenity now!

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