This year American Idol has variously been about dead stalkers, endless judge-based in-fighting and bikinis.

What’s missing from this list? That’s right, actual singing. But yesterday American Idol changed all this – for the first time in ages, American Idol wasn’t about Paula fighting with Kara, or Simon fighting with Kara, or singers getting kicked out for being a bit too professional, or the sneaking suspicion that Kara can deploy evil hypnotic pulse-waves from her cranium to defeat her enemies. It was all about singing.

And what was this brand new, contestant-centric American Idol like? Pretty blinking dull, as it happens.

The American Idol semi-final episodes are always the dullest part of the series. We haven’t got to know the finalists well enough to learn that they used to be balls-out strippers or have fathers who appear to be moustache-twirling villains from the silent movie age, but we don’t have the procession of entertainingly bad/ borderline disabled singers from the early episodes, either. All we have to keep us going is a long, flat stream of unrelenting mediocrity.

American Idol seems to sense this, too, which is why recent weeks have been full of distractions like the contestant who was booted off for already being famous or the world’s least erotic catfight between Paula Abdul and Kara DioGuardi.

But, having run out of cartoonish sideshows for the time being, last night’s American Idol was forced to concentrate on singing. After all, singing is what will lead one of the American Idol contestants to release one big-selling midtempo, robotically inspirational power-ballad before plunging into Taylor Hicks-style oblivion forever. So how did that work out?

Well, it was sort of OK. We suppose. As usual, three of the semi-finalists were voted through to the American Idol finals – we don’t know their names, so let’s call them Monobrowed Spaniard Number One, The Blind Chap and someone who we believe to be Short Round from Indiana Jones 2 – but in addition to this, American Idol decided to go back and pick eight ‘wild-cards’ (read ‘failures’) to have another shot.

We can’t be bothered to name the eight American Idol wild-cards, so here’s MSNBC with a list:

The participants in Thursday’s wild-card round were announced at the end of the show, with four men and four women getting another chance. The men picked were Von Smith, Ricky Braddy, Matt Giraud and Anoop Desai, and the women Jasmine Murray, Megan Joy Corkrey, Jesse Langseth, and the predictably hysterical Tatiana Del Toro.

Oh great. More Tatiana Del Toro. Still, at least when she gets voted out of American Idol - which we’re praying will happen soon – it won’t be the end of the line for her. After all, there have to be thousands of opportunities for women who have speaking voices like rape alarms, right?

But still, congratulations to the three who made it through to the American Idol finals last night. They’ll be joining, in no particular order, Mr Bland, Miss Bland, Sobbing Deaf Wife Bloke, Another Miss Bland, Another Mr Bland and Ridiculous Emo Tit.

Christ, can someone get Paula to start another fight, please? That’d be much more entertaining.

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