8. My experience of watching the german casting show ‘Deutschland sucht den Superstar’ (Germany is looking for the superstar) (similar to X-Factor) as a young teenager and how it impacted my life

No triggers I think, but please tell me if I'm wrong.

I grew up watching this show and one of my biggest wishes when I was 13 was to be on it. I actually had already decided to go and audition there as soon as I turned 16, which is the age at which you can enter there. Watching some moments in the show completely changed that. Which is probably a good thing. I would have had a really rough time there. I know that because I saw some other people having a really rough time there. I’m not talking about ‘the funny ones’, the people who come to the auditions and really can’t sing and are therefore ridiculed - I really don’t want to know where this human condition came from. Anyway, I’m not talking about this phenomenon today (though maybe another time). I want to tell you about two moments in the history of the show. One of which made me reverse my decision to go on that show. The other made me stop watching the show. Both made me believe that the show was cruel and discriminative. All for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’ 

I first want to tell you about the moment that made me stop watching the show altogether. In 2009 they decided to ‘spice things up a bit’. In a Recall Challenge the boys had to basically sing while bungee-jumping from a crane-thing. If you were very afraid of heights you could not have done it. The girls had to sing while having a snake on their body. They had to look like they were enjoying it to score points with the jury. What? I mean I understand that it’s an entertainment show, but what? 

A) Why can’t boys and girls do the same thing? B) Why do people who are very afraid of heights or snakes be treated the same as people who bungee-jump for fun in their free time or who have a snake as a pet? Some of these people were terrified. Yet they were criticised for being afraid. The people said that that was ‘what Britney Spears was doing’. Well, Britney Spears probably wouldn’t have done it if she had been terrified of snakes. She would have done something else. I thought that this was so unfair and sickening that I directly switched off the TV and stopped watching the show altogether. I don’t get the fascination with shows like ‘I’m a Celebrity - get me out of here!’ I really, really don’t. But still. Perhaps the people in this casting show were even more vulnerable. Extremely young, seemingly close to fulfilling their dream and just as seemingly close to failing at it. And the show just treated them like crap. I mean wow. And I still remember this, even after six years.

The second moment I want to tell you about happened a year before. A sixteen-year-old girl came to a casting. She had quite a good voice if I remember correctly, good enough to pass the first casting at least. They made her beg. They made her drop on her knees and effing beg. How messed up and sick is that? And when they did let her through they called her back and took the glasses off her face and said: “Can’t you get contacts?” The woman judge said: “Look what a pretty girl you are!” - Without the glasses. The girl did get contacts, which actually infected her eyes - she was fine, no major consequences came from it, but she was red-eyed and in some level of discomfort for a while. She didn’t get as far as the live shows. Not only did I feel really bad for the girl, it also made me feel kind of heartbroken. I was a thirteen-year-old girl who was having self-esteem issues anyway. I believed that I was good at singing, my plan was to go on that show at age 16 and see how far I would get - I reckoned that I would either go through or, if not, wouldn’t be on TV because it at least wouldn’t be embarrassing. But - I wore glasses. I spent the next three years obssessing about getting contacts - even though they are less safe for your eyes than glasses. I thought that with glasses I would never be pretty enough to do anything, let alone become a singer. My eyes don’t take contacts. When the opticians tried to put them in, the only thing I ever achieved, was having a full-blown panic attack. I tried, again, and again. It didn’t work. Does that mean that I can’t be a singer? As far as I’m concerned, the fact that I wear glasses and my inability to get contact lenses into my eyes do not affect my ability to sing at all. Who knows, perhaps if I ever managed to wear contacts, I could play the piano with my feet and the violin with my hands, while singing a simultaneous duet with myself as both a low bass and a high soprano. If there was even the slightest indication of that being true, I would say:
“Oh, boy, you were right, contacts are awesome!”

But, of course, they wouldn’t be right, because even if that was true, I would still be able to sing just fine without the lenses.

In all probability, they were trying to prepare this young girl for the cruel, cruel world. In doing this, they were supporting the cruel, cruel world, saying “We approve of this discrimination.”

I don’t. I don’t approve of any discrimination. If you want to do a traditional Shakespeare’s play you would probably not be able to wear modern glasses. But if you’re playing yourself? If you’re a singer on a stage who isn’t trying to do anything but sing? Why on earth would it matter what they looked like? I think, even from a business-y point of view it’d be good to have singers who you can actually tell apart from one another.