The Piano, series 2, review: X Factor-style sob stories have muscled in on the magic

Claudia Winkleman, a smart cookie, had her reservations about the second series of The Piano (Channel 4). “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she tells judges Mika and Lang Lang, “but when we did this the first time I thought, ‘And we’re done.’”

That’s because series one was a perfect, self-contained show. The hopefuls had no idea that the pop star and superstar pianist were secretly watching their performances, and that the best of them would be invited to perform at the Royal Festival Hall.

With that element of surprise gone, the programme-makers are borrowing heavily from the Simon Cowell playbook. So when a woman called Emma played Abba’s The Winner Takes It All and an underwhelmed Mika said: “It’s just not working,” the next step was for him to ask: “Do you think she can play something else?” Emma was duly brought back, had an equally practised song up her sleeve, and appeared to wow the judges second time around.

We have seen this many, many times on The X Factor. The auditionees have been chosen for their back stories, not their talent. Which is not to say they don’t have talent – nine-year-old Ethan, for example, was brilliant. But the music was clearly secondary in the producers’ eyes.

Instead we had: a boxer who grew up on a needle-strewn council estate but can play Chopin; a young woman who arrived in the UK as a child refugee; a blind man with a guide dog; and the aforementioned Emma, who wept at the memory of her tough divorce. Young Ethan doesn’t seem to understand a lot of emotional feelings, his father said, but can express it through music. He played a song in memory of his uncle, who died from cancer a year ago.

On top of that, there are too many singers. This is supposed to be a piano-playing contest, not a singing show. Like I said, though, Winkleman is a smart cookie. And she knows that viewers love emotional stories, and that those stories will eventually overpower any cynicism.

Duncan, aged 80, played a piece he had composed for his wife, Fran. In the preamble video, it was revealed that Duncan has dementia. Claudia went up to see Mika and Lang Lang, to demand that Duncan go through to the final. “It’s not a debate,” she said firmly. “Duncan and Fran need it. And it’s also important to have somebody like that. The fact that he can speak through the piano, that’s what is keeping his disease at bay. And what are we if we are not putting that on the stage?” It was a forceful argument, and it won the day.