ITV Gives up on West End After Grease???

While BBC executives have been celebrating this week’s successful opening of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in which their Any Dream Will Do winner Lee Mead took the title role (See 1st Night Photos, 18 Jul 2007), ITV has reportedly abandoned the West End talent search format after the ratings flop of their rival reality show Grease Is the Word.

The two TV series went head-to-head on Saturday nights throughout April and May, with both crowning their publicly voted victors on 9 June – Danny Bayne and Susan McFadden were named the new Danny and Sandy in the upcoming revival of Grease, which opens on 8 August (previews from 25 July) at the Piccadilly Theatre (See News, 11 Jun 2007) – but Any Dream Will Do consistently pulled ahead in the TV ratings. For the respective finales, the BBC attracted 7.6 million viewers versus ITV’s 4 million.

According to Simon Cowell, whose Syco production company was behind Grease Is the Word, the show deserved to be “slaughtered by the critics”. And ITV director Simon Shaps told The Stage newspaper: “Grease Is the Word did not do as well as we had hoped and so we have no immediate plans to do any more. We are pretty well stocked for Saturday night entertainment at the moment with shows like The X Factor and Dancing on Ice. I would not rule out doing something similar in the future, but at the moment we are not looking at doing any more.” Meanwhile, the BBC is already planning its next musical theatre talent project with Andrew Lloyd Webber, possibly to cast Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (See The Goss, 6 Jul 2007).

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