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If you missed the first series of the Channel 4 talent show The Piano, allow me to explain the concept. Contestants are amateur pianists from all walks of life, with varying degrees of musical training, who perform on a train station piano (a nice one, whisked away from the sticky-fingered public soon after filming). Unbeknown to them, two judges – the singer Mika and concert pianist Lang Lang – hide away watching, only to surprise them at the end and tell them that one of them has been chosen to participate in a special concert. It’s as though – and sorry if you’re squeamish – The Great Pottery Throwdown had a ménage à trois with Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents and The X Factor.
The only thing is that here, in its second series, the game is up. Due to the success of the programme last year, if you’re invited by Channel 4 to play the piano in a train station and greeted by a beaming Claudia Winkleman you’re probably not going to believe anyone who tells you you’re being featured in a documentary. And so The Piano has solved the problem with a very exciting twist: it’s exactly the same, but now Mika and Lang Lang’s positioning in a staff room just above the main concourse is essentially pointless.
First up, the team are in Manchester to hear from the city’s budding talents. I really tried to get on board. I liked all the people featured. But even the most moving personal stories cannot make me enjoy this, the most anodyne fluff you could possibly conceive of in dreams so un-wild even Carl Jung couldn’t read into them.
Simply, it treats both its viewers and contestants like idiots. It’s as though the judges – who, by the way, have about as much chemistry as two different bottles of in-date semi-skimmed milk being mixed together – are doing charity work, never moving in their commentary beyond thrillingly original and #BeKind observations such as “never judge a book by it’s cover, it’s brilliant”.
The ever-electric, warm and effervescent Winkleman does her best – but all this means is that the highlight of the whole hour is her brief flirtation with a sausage dog named Henry, who belongs to a member of the public who’s stopped to watch. Because the judges are, now for no good reason, in a room above the performers, every performance can be overcut with their commentary, like a TikTok explainer – this means that we don’t actually have the chance to hear or watch the performances in their entirety. Some, like 80-year-old Duncan’s piece written for his wife Fran, are beautiful and moving, but we only see half of them, being subjected instead to more green-top inanities. Again, I’m thrilled for the contestants who get a lot out of playing in public – but it seems to me that those performances would be just as meaningful in a small community, not splashed sensationally over the country’s TV screens.
That The Piano is self-confessedly about the stories of its contestants rather than its central instrument means that there is no tangible judging criteria, no benchmark, no consistency. It might as well be Mel and Sue sitting up there, for all I learn about piano playing – and the stakes are extremely low. “Who will be the next… pianist?” asks the voiceover, immediately exposing the hollow concept of this show. I can see what it’s trying to do; I have no doubt the finalists’ concert will be a delight – but do we really need several hours of this before we get there?
The contestants are largely very likeable and often talented. So all I can do is lament that they have been dragged into the result of a Friday afternoon Channel 4 meeting in which executives concluded that what the British public really needs isn’t culture or music or even in-depth human stories, but to gorge itself silly on a bottomless brunch of overseasoned sentimentalism.
