Guy Sebastian has clarified the revelatory comments he made about the role Channel 7 producers have in running The Voice.
Last week, Guy Sebastian told Yahoo! that he and fellow judges Keith Urban, Jessica Mauboy, and Rita Ora are equipped with a set of guidelines on how to approach judging specific contestants.
“I think the producers go into it with a fair bit of thought,” Sebastian noted. Explaining that the red books the judges are armed with contain loose instructions on how to approach each contestant.
“It’ll sort of just say like, what state they’re from. There’s no names, no gender or anything like that,” he said. “We never get told anything about who they are, we don’t get told the song.
“But if it’s a really random song, like one that’s some B-side Whitesnake or Radiohead or something that not everyone knows, we get told that so that we don’t think it’s an original.”
In past seasons of The Voice, the judges are allowed a finite amount of chair turns — this season, judges were given unlimited swivel freedom. To counteract the possibility of there only being one chair turned (ergo boring entertainment), producers include notes suggesting when each judge should turn.
“You want the artist to feel like there are two coaches fighting over them, otherwise, how do you make a good segment out of that? It’s just literally, ‘oh Keith is the only one that turned, so you’re stuck with Keith,” Sebastian explained.
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“This season we’ve got unlimited chair turns so sometimes if there’s one coach that goes in for a chair turn, to make it more interesting, you may as well go in there and have a crack at pitching,” he said.
“So there are little things the producer will write in, stuff like, ‘If this is just a one-chair turn, maybe jump in’,” he revealed.
In a comment shared to the Tone Deaf Facebook page, Sebastian clarified that he has “never once been told who to turn my chair for.”
“We are only given reminders of the different format changes for example this year there are unlimited chair turns instead of 12 spots which means if we are on the fence we don’t need to be selective,” he wrote. “Obviously it’s way better to give the artist a choice and to battle it out with another coach than to default to only one coach who turns.”
“We make a big effort to make the artists feel valued and to add to their artistry in a safe environment,” Sebastian continued. “Even when artists don’t get a chair turn we make sure it’s a positive experience by giving feedback, or joining them onstage with a duet etc to make sure they don’t go home feeling like it was a failure.”
Thaaaaaaat’s showbiz baby! For more on this topic follow the Film & TV Observer.
