Chart Throb - Ben Elton

[goodreads]

Title: Chart Throb
Author: Ben Elton
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 464
Date read: September, 2010

Chart Throb - the ultimate pop quest. Ninety-five thousand hopefuls. Three judges. Just one winner. And that is Calvin Simms, the genius behind the show. Calvin always wins because Calvin writes the rules.

But this year, as he sits smugly in judgment upon the clingers and blingers whom he has preselected in his carefully scripted "search" for a star, he has no idea that the rules are changing. The "real" is about to be put back into "reality" television, and Calvin and his fellow judges (the nation's favorite mom and the other guy) are about to become "ex-factors" themselves. Ben Elton returns to blistering comic satire with a vengeance in this no-holds-barred competition. One winner. A whole bunch of losers. Crazed, no-talent, fame junkies . . . and those are just the judges.

Chart Throb is very much like Dead Famous (also by Ben Elton) in that it takes a reality TV phenomenon to its logical extreme. In Dead Famous "Big Brother" came under scrutiny - here it is "X-Factor" and that ilk. Just like while reading Dead Famous I was kept fascinated throughout the book, could hardly put it down (read it in less than 24 hours in fact), yet felt uncomfortably like a voyeur while reading it... which I suspect was the purpose.

Chart Throb had very few likeable characters, and I was occasionally annoyed to be more or less manipulated into feeling sorry for the most unsympathetic characters... yet I could actually easily believe that such characters exist. I got a good laugh out of reading about HRH, The Prince of Wales though, and although I greatly had to suspend my disbelief for it to work, I thought it was a nice touch.

The main problem with reading Chart Throb and Blind Faith back to back was that I noticed a lot of phrases and ideas being reused. While "Love you big time" and "I'll big you up" sounds completely plausible in a future society, here it just sounded fake. (And what is up with this fascination with Wuthering Heights? From Babysitter's Club to Twilight, it's held in great esteem by everybody, and I feel tricked, because personally I think it's one of the worst books I've ever read!)