Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  The news that I Can’t Sing! is to close after only two months has been swiftly followed by people saying that they are not surprised that it did not turn out to be the latest all-conquering blockbuster on Simon Cowell’s CV.

The question remains, however. Why did it fail? The reviews gave it a pretty unanimous thumbs up. I didn’t think it was perfect but it was a very good, very enjoyable night out with some cracking songs and some cracking gags. Harry Hill's madcap sense of humour worked for me and Steve Brown's pop pastiches were exceedingly hummable.

But it did seem to be an odd project. There were mutterings among cynics during the run-up that The X Factor was passé darling, so it was a bit late to be launching a major musical about it. The involvement of Simon Cowell seemed to give it credibility, but since last night’s closure at least one wag has joked that maybe Cowell was copying the plot of the Producers and he has worked out a way of making money out of a show that closes early.

I think I Can’t Sing! failed to attract enough punters because it was simply too clever. As I would have thought Simon Cowell would know, the old adage goes that nobody ever  ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The creative team here tried to be too clever with the British public. I Can’t Sing! had a singing hunchback and an old man in an iron lung that interfered with the TV reception. How could it fail?

But it was possibly too satirical for its own good. The concept very loosely reminded me of Jerry Springer The Opera, but where that seemed to aim upmarket with its libretto appealing to opera fans, the X Factor subject matter was always going to have to appeal to an ITV demographic. And at the end of the day if they are going to buy tickets for an X Factor-based show maybe they would have been just as happy buying tickets for real X Factor contestants at Wembley Arena.

I think there may be a disconnect between the millions of gogglebox-based X Factor fans and the kind of people who go to West End theatres. Meanwhile Harry Hill's followers would probably rather see him in the flesh at the Hammersmith Apollo or dust off their TV Burp DVDs than see something he has written without him in it. And while I've always loved Hill's madcap surrealism it always quietly amazed me that TV Burp was such a big, broad success. Maybe the Palladium was a step too far for his off-the-wall sensibility. Though maybe if Hill had played Simon Cowell that might have added some starrier pulling power.

At times when I was watching ICS! at the Palladium it just felt too smart to be a mainstream success, where simple plots and Abba and Queen songs seem to be what the people want. It was maybe this smartness that the critics liked. There was one scene in which Simon, played by Nigel Harman, dances down a set of steps and it briefly feels like a proper, glittery, traditional musical. Maybe if there had been more of that and less of the singing hunchback – no disrespect to Charlie Baker, who was a great singing hunchback – it could have been a straightforward hit.

I have a huge amount of sympathy for all the people involved in I Can’t Sing! They’ve put so much effort into it. I’m not a musicals expert, but it is clearly a tough market. Andrew Lloyd Webber surely knows what he is doing and even he had a flop with his recent Stephen Ward musical. The old film-making saying is that nobody knows anything. We can theorise until the singing hunchbacks come home, but I guess the same might be true for big budget musicals at the moment.

Read Beyond The Joke's review of I Can't Sing! here.