Very rarely does the television industry come up with a truly good idea. That said, it may have accidentally stumbled across one. The Dutch version of The Voice is about to make a spin-off series dedicated solely to pensioners.
The Voice Senior will consist of a handful of episodes, none broadcast live, that will feature only contestants aged 65 or over. And, honestly, it sounds like the best possible version of The Voice. Based on statistics alone, the standard version of the show is a dud, with none of the winners going on to achieve a meaningful career in music. Meanwhile, The Voice Kids comes with the horrible tang of exploitation, since its contestants are unable to process the level of rejection that participation requires.
However, if all the contestants are retired, everything changes. The likelihood is that they will be entering purely for the joy of singing. They will have no expectations, and none of the sweaty desperation of their younger counterparts. The whole thing will be about the elderly having fun. It sounds like an absolute blast.
Hopefully, The Voice Senior will be replicated around the world. To be frank, the entire landscape of unscripted talent-show television – chock-full of identical, hoary franchises all content with spinning their wheels to ever-diminishing returns – needs a boot up the rear, and, by God, the elderly are the people to deliver it.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that most shows (with the possible exception of The Jump) would be truly galvanised by OAP spin-off versions. Let me walk you through some ideas.
Love Island
Unlike First Dates, which does include its fair share of the elderly, Love Island is focused solely on the lunk-headed buffoonery of youth. This is one hell of a missed opportunity. A full series where all the strutting, hair-gelled, horny, twentysomething morons were jettisoned in favour of a selection of people who had already had their hearts broken by divorce or bereavement and just wanted to find a moment or two of meaningful companionship would be a tremendous, life-affirming piece of television.
The Apprentice
Depending on how kind you are being, The Apprentice lives to serve one of two functions. The first is to find genuinely capable businesspeople and celebrate their ingenuity. If that is the case, then it is only logical to make a series where all the candidates have built up a lifetime of knowledge and wisdom. The Apprentice’s second function is to locate and promote a series of dreadful rightwing, reactionary Katie Hopkins-style wingnuts, and anyone who has ever been home for Christmas knows that these aren’t exactly in short supply among older people. Either way, it is a win-win.
The X Factor
If anything, The X Factor would benefit from a senior version even more than The Voice, purely on the basis that pensioners are much less likely to put up with any of Simon Cowell’s nonsense. Imagine one of your grandparents taking part in the six-chair challenge. Imagine how quickly they would realise that life was simply too short to spend squabbling in such a gladiatorial bear pit. They would naff off as soon as Nicole Scherzinger starting pulling a faux-agonised face, wouldn’t they? It would be brilliant. I would be much more keen to watch The X Factor if none of the contestants was invested in the show’s bullshit machinations.
Big Brother
Imagine a version of Big Brother where the contestants had long grown out of wanting to peacock for the cameras. Imagine a version of Big Brother where the contestants had figured out how to stem domestic flare-ups before they became unmanageable. Imagine a version of Big Brother where the contestants actually knew how to run a household. That’s the version of Big Brother I would like to watch. Admittedly, in Channel 5’s hands, they would probably just turn it into a live-feed of a nursing home, full of people shouting frail non-sequiturs over full-volume Police Interceptor repeats, so maybe we should rule this one out.
