Darwin Award TV

Television talent shows entered a whole new era this week in Germany, when emergency help was needed for three separate incidents on their equivalent of 'Britain's Got Talent'.

First 16-year-old singer Laura Pinski almost choked to death on glitter confetti as it showered down on her just as she was breathing in to hit the high note for her big finish.

You may detect just the merest whiff of journalistic hyperbole here (the source being the Daily Mail), but you have to admit that it would have been a demise with Zeitgeist written all over it; I wonder whether the 'Casualty' scriptwriters have thought of it yet.

Then opera soprano Simone Ciccarese lost his voice because stunt technicians on the Supertalent show had flooded the stage with too much dry ice.

Stop sniggering at the back there! Though if the Mail is actually correct about Herr Ciccarese's vocal range, I'd have thought that a bit of dry ice was the least of his problems - he was a tenor last week. Perhaps he had an unfortunate encounter with these chaps:

Finally, firefighters had to rescue contestants Leo and Christian from a blaze when their act - smashing up a car on stage - sparked a blaze as the petrol tank went up in flames.

I have to admit I'm struggling to equate this one with the word 'talent'; I'm assuming that it's something to do with angle-grinders, which have unaccountably become a fashionable source of entertainment, at least if you add enough loud music and scantily-clad women.

It is, of course, thanks to this last 'act' that the phrase Darwin Award springs to mind, although anyone who is prepared to risk the slings and arrows of a televised talent show is likely to have a rather higher Darwin Quotient than the general population.

And, to be honest, an audience ready to applaud two men applying power tools to scrap metal suggests that, somewhere out there, a thousand villages are lacking their idiots; had the theatre gone up in flames, some kind of collective Darwin Award nomination would surely have been called for.

Although the presenter of 'Das Supertalent' sounded afterwards like someone trying to make lemonade out of life's lemons - 'Well at least it proves the show is 100 per cent live' - the producers may be viewing things very differently.

This was the first in a new series of a programme that had 'come under criticism of late due to dwindling viewer numbers'; I can't see that being much of a problem next week, as millions tune in expectantly awaiting the next themed mishap to befall an unfortunate contestant.

It's bound to be a sure-fire success.