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Yet Another British Reality Tv Show To Make Us Bitterly Jealous Of Our Pals Across The Pond

3:19PM Clem Bastow | We’ve spoken at length before about our love of the UK’s knack for coming up with incredible celebreality television concepts, from Celebrity Wife Swap sending Freddie Starr’s wife to play lesbians with Sam Fox’s lover, to Kerry Katona’s fly-on-the-wall series. Well, those crazy Brits have outdone themselves AGAIN, this time managing to make us drool unfairly by combining car crash television with our other great loves, musical theatre and child performers! They come from all over the country and from very different backgrounds but these 12 boys are all prepared to do anything to be Oliver. The contestants are the dozen finalists in the BBC’s latest collaboration with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. On offer to three of the boys is a coveted part in West End musical Oliver! The shortlist has been whittled down from 3,000 and all 12 of the finalists are aged 10 to 13 with nine from England, two from Wales and one from Northern Ireland. Jordan, 13, from Wrexham, is a Chelsea fan who has set his heart on a career in musical theatre. He says his idols are Ant and Dec. Gwion, 11, from Carmarthen, names Harry Potter actor Gary Oldman as his ideal co-star and has ambitions of going on to be a director. Meanwhile Kwayedze, 13, from Kent, wants to pursue a song-writing career, says his favourite group is Boyz II Men and would love to work with Johnny Depp. Etc, etc – there are 12 of the plucky little buggers! The show is also pitting 12 young female performers against each other in the bloody fight to win the role of Oliver’s guardian angel/scrag with a heart of gold, Nancy. Apart from anything else, the whole thing is so massively, fantastically camp – look at the official site! What makes us even more seething with jealousy is that this is the third installment in the series; previously How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? and Any Dream Will Do found new stars for The Sound Of Music and Joseph & The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat respectively. No fair! We’d give our right arm, and probably our left one too, if we could get Grant Denyer and Erica Heynatz off the tele and something like this on it! More »