[Written Sunday 27 April 2008]

OK, so I’ve just sat down to watch this week’s (26th April) ‘I’d Do Anything’ and I am feeling rather mixed about it. Although there were a few fantastic performances this week, I feel that there were far too many duff performances for this stage of the competition.

The worst performance by far had to be Niamh’s cover of ‘Valerie’…

Out of tune, an ‘attitude’ that stunk, painful and the choreography made me cringe terribly! She made a lot of progress with me last week; however I think that she’s just gone and undone it now and she’d be my choice to leave this week to be honest.

Sarah is going from strength to strength – WOW! I’d now place her as my number 1 choice to be Nancy!

Samantha was absolutely awesome at belting out ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ and really gave it some welly! Alas, the BBC have yet to put a clip of her up on YouTube it would appear.

Jodie stunned me – a real mature performance for once and she proved she’s got a fabulous set of lungs on her! I hated 9 to 5 last week, I thought she massacred it, but her version of “I Have Nothing” was believable, powerful and emotive! Another strong contender!

As for Jessie, I’m not raving about her so much at the moment. She needs another ‘One Night Only’ to get back to my good spot me thinks. Ashley now seems a lost cause… her performance this week was bland, unrecognisable and forgettable. Such a pity as I really do like her. That said, I would still hope that she’d be there next week.

The Olivers did one of my favourite songs from Annie (Hard-Knock life) which I really enjoyed too. Chester is probably my fave Oliver thus far and perhaps one of the least ‘weird’ hehe.

Written Monday 28 April 2008

Finally had chance to watch the results show, and I was not particularly surprised at the bottom two. I must confess that I was routing for Niamh to go initially, however I can see why, after 4 ‘bottom two’s’ that Keisha had to be dropped – especially when she’d consistently been the least popular Nancy and thus was really taking up another girl’s place.

Their sing-off on The Rose was awesome and moved me somewhat. It also helped to convince me that Niamh should stay this week, despite the fact that I really dislike her fringe!

In all my time of being infactuated with everything ALW related (not in a perverse/weird sense though!) I’ve never seen or heard of the Lord coming across as annoyed as this though – I couldn’t tell at first if he made an early exit at the end due to his anger or just another of his ill-timed TV moments (such as his faces and pointing hehe). It was only when I saw the close-ups on YouTube that I saw the sense of fury that was spread across his face that I realised how ticked-off he seemed!

Something else clicked with me this evening too, and that being that Cameron Mackintosh probably has a lot more involvement in Andrew’s decisions than the Lord himself. As we all know, the theatre production is Cameron’s and Andrew’s merely fronting the TV show for him – and so it stands to reason that Cameron should be making the executive decisions really. I would presume that the results show is now on a Sunday for a few reasons; on the surface due to the voting fiasco that normally surrounds these things, weird scheduling reasons at the BBC  (e.g. Russell T Davies is rumoured to be very unhappy at the random placing of Doctor Who this season) and also so that Cameron has chance to review the show and share his thoughts with Andrew prior to the sing-off. I also think that would explain why Andrew decided to save Ashley last week, despite doling out some of the harshest critique that I’ve seen him give. Maybe I have an over-active imagination, but one cannot help thinking that Cameron is certainly pulling strings at a very high level, despite his reluctance to appear on the TV show.