Andrew Lloyd Webber Announces Horrible New Musical TV Search

At this time of year, you're likely to encounter all kinds of Best Of lists for 2006 and very few Worst Of lists, so just to help you out, the absolute worst TV show shown anywhere in 2006 was BBC1's How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria.

Frighteningly, though, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria was actually successful - successful enough for toady-looking moneybag Andrew Lloyd Webber to announce another similar musical TV show based on Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat named Any Dream Will Do. That's right - after a nationwide search to find a young woman who could sing with the effortless power and grace of Julie Andrews, Any Dream Will Do will see Andrew Lloyd Webber looking for a bloke who sounds like Phillip Schofield. 

Sounds like a ratings smash, we're sure.

God, but How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria was horrible, wasn't it? We're talking sub-Love Island horrible. At least with Love Island you knew your license fee wasn't basically going straight into Andrew Lloyd Webber's pocket. If you were lucky enough not to see How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, this is more or less what happened - it was X Factor. Only, instead of a bootcamp stage there was a 'look how fabulously wealthy Andrew Lloyd Webber is' stage, and instead of live shows featuring wannabe popstars singing popular hits of the day, it had live shows featuring hateful dead-eyed stageschool McCutcheon-alikes badly emoting through It's Oh So Quiet by Bjork like even-more annoying versions of the big-toothed girl from Narnia. And guess what? It's coming back!

Thanks to the inexplicable success of How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria in making the West End production of The Sound of Music - and therefore Andrew Lloyd Webber - more money than you can imagine, Andrew Lloyd Webber is at it again. You see, Andrew Lloyd Webber gets no joy from selling off pieces of Nazi art any more - he's had a taste of being a tenth-rate Simon Cowell clone, and he likes it. But he's a clever one, we'll admit - the sequel to How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria is going to be based on Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat - a show he wrote - which means he'll get more songwriting royalties than from the Maria show.

Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat - for those of you who don't know - is the biblical tale of then time when Phillip Schofield was given quite a nice coat by God, which he only wore for special occasions like when his nan was coming round and stuff. We'd sum up Andrew Lloyd Webber's feelings about the new series of Any Dream Will Do as 'smug', which is hardly a surprise because that seems to be his default setting. Anyway, this is what he said:

"The success of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? this summer was a real boost for musical theatre in Britain and I was particularly thrilled with the reaction from schoolchildren up and down the country. I cannot wait to get them involved in Any Dream Will Do and to get back into the studio with Graham. Joseph started in schools and I am looking for a great school choir - to play in the West End, we need a smashing girl, a great boy and of course a Pharaoh/Elvis."

Oh thank God. For a second there we thought that Any Dream Will Do was going to be an all-boy affair, and that would have deprived us of the one chink of fun that How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria gave us - watching Andrew Lloyd Webber acting like the sleaziest man in the universe, telephoning young girls up and saying "Hello. This is Andrew Lloyd Webber" in a way so unbearably creepy that our skin didn't just crawl, it leapt off our body and hid in the cellar until we promised it that the bad man had gone away.

In summary, then, we probably won't be watching Andrew Lloyd Webber's Any Dream Will Do show, and we'd happily watch anything - anything - else that ITV wants to show at the same time. What's that? ITV is showing basically the same thing, but about Grease?

Oh bollocks.

Read more: 

TV search for new West End Joseph - BBC