Well, as one of the songs nearly goes, blow me, it's fabulous. Well maybe not quite, but after all the negative stories about recalcitrant scenery and overrunning scripts I Can't Sing! The X Factor Musical, by Harry Hill and Steve Brown, is a thoroughly enjoyable romp. A very silly parody, a tart social satire and some pretty hummable songs too.
Things start off particularly well as we see suburban schoolboy Simon Cowell already counting cash on the couch and explaining why he wears his trousers so high – it's to stop the bullies giving him wedgies. From there things move quickly to as caravan under a flyover where granddad's iron lung means that young Chenice (Cynthia Erivo, great voice) can't always pick up ITV on her portable telly. Lucky Chenice, some might say. Full marks to set designer Es Devlin here – it is hard to tell where the real flyover ends and the projected images begin, though I presume the passenger jet was fake.
Soon, however we are in familiar X Factor territory, with the hopeless, hapless wannabes lining up for their shot at the top. There's Wagner-like Vladimir (with a touch of Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno), Chenice's love interest, simple, nice Max (Alan Morrissey) and two Shamrock-encrusted Irish dimwits, Alter Boyz - no relation to Jedward I'm sure.
The songs come thick and fast, pastiching everything from soul to Eminem-style rap. One, Please Simon, sounds for a moment like the intro to Spitting Image. There's some great dancing on supermarket conveyor belts and Charlie Baker is a hit as hunchbacked Trevor Modo, offering the back story to end all back stories. And then there are the judges. Sexpot Jordy, doddery Louis and immaculate Simon, the latter played with camp god-like grandeur by Nigel Harman.
Oh, and did I mention the talking dog Barlow? The puppeteer who controls him is played by Simon Lipkin, who happens to look remarkably like a young Simon Cowell - maybe this is a coincidence, maybe it is a comment on Cowell being the ultimate puppet master. Who knows? One thing is for sure. Simon Bailey as Liam O'Deary, all cheese, blokey-ness and possible inner torment, could stand in for Dermot on the real thing.
If anything too much is going on. Director Sean Foley seems to lob everything into the mix, frequently drawing on other musical hits. At one point it goes all Producers on us with a big song and dance number. Elsewhere it nods to Les Mis, while the self-referential title tune has echoes of Spamalot's The Song The Goes Like This. It's a montrously uneven hunchback of a show, but it wins one over by sheer, relentless daft humour.
It is all nonsense, but great British nonsense in the tradition of Hill's best TV work. The main thing to say about I Can't Sing is that it is a hoot. Critics who declare that it is already dated are merely being mean-spirited. Just one thought lingered after seeing it. Why did Simon Cowell become a producer? That Spitting Image echo mentioned earlier might offer a key. I was watching that BBC4 doc on Spitting Image the other week and of course what the "victims" said is that they were rather flattered to be satirised. Maybe Cowell is rather flattered by effectively being the star of a West End musical.
