The Journey is Over

During last night's stupendously shithouse final performance show on Australian Idol 3, the camera darted out to an emotional Anne Robertson, her face awash with tears.

"Goodbye forever, Australian Idol TV Show," her eyes seemed to say. "I could have taken this show somewhere magic. Instead, mmm-hmm, these bitches are seriously blowing it."

Of course, what she was actually thinking was, "Thank our benevolent God for humans, and larynxes, and Emily Williams, who is, in defiance of centuries' worth of advanced medical understanding, my heart (and also, at times, confusingly, Marcia Hines's)."


"Congratulations - your heart is a healthy girl."

But the fact remains. Kate De Rouge dished out more of her consistent flatlining brand of "quite good", but Emily was so far below par she was virtually handing the title to Kate. (Though in her defence, Emily's woeful rendition of the most amazing pop song in a decade, "Since U Been Gone", was actually better than Kelly Clarkson's own performance of that song at the American Music Awards.)

And, since this is Australia, voters might just decide that Emily really is just an unchaste little thing from New Zealand who's really just not all that much better than our dinky-di, blond, slimming, country-town, Venetta Fields-coached-and-therefore-John-Farnham-impersonating young (possibly, in the future) powerhouse.

So who to vote for? There's a certain importance in the choice.

I know I am in the minority, but the fact is that both previous series of Australian Idol have delivered the correct winner. Obviously, Guy as winner of series one was a no-brainer (see Figure 1).


Fig. 1: A no-brainer

Barring Ricki-Lee's ejection and potential future touchdown opportunities therefore unexplored, and setting aside Anthony Callea's stunning rendition of "The Prayer", the correct choice as winner for series two was still Casey Donovan. She remains an amazingly gifted interpreter of song who earned five touchdowns in a single series. She just happened to be extremely poorly marketed by a misguided team of short-sighted alleged professionals, and was not helped by her own failure to grasp the concept of sentence structure.

Now neither Kate nor Emily has truly risen to Guy/Shannon/Cosima/Anthony/Casey/Ricki-Lee heights. But of the two, Emily is the only appropriate choice, despite her performance "efforts" last night. For Kate to win with no touchdowns and for just generally being "quite good" would be a bit shit, really. Emily needs to take this out if the show is to be saved at all.

But then again, perhaps it doesn't need saving. Three series is a good innings. That's two more than X-Factor, and precisely three more than "Cooks".

May the least objectionable singer "win".