This sounds pretty poor ethics, but people might not realise stuff like this was going on anyway.
As some people will remember from the time, I was on the very first series of PopIdol. The auditions shown on the screen with Simon Cowell et all are NOT the first round auditions, far from it, they are actually forth, in order to weed out people they don't want on the show. However they don't weed out the bad, just the AVERAGE, hense boring. So they purposely LET bad people through the first three rounds, encoraging them to think they had a chance of winning.
By forth auditions, I also mean forth DAY! These people were hanging around in London, with press all around them, getting their hopes up, and no-one had told them they were bad. The other contestants didn't know as we weren't allowed to sing to each other, but we all bonded close friendships over those few days. THEN the poor suckers had Cowell et all diss them down on National TV, telling them they should go home and give up, after 3 days of other judges going "fantastic we'll have you through!".
Thankfully I was one of the better ones, and so was let down gracefully a while later, but I saw many people who I had become friends with taken advantage of in this cruel way. When the show aired I sold this story to a few magazines and papers, and gave the money to charity - I couldn't let them get away with that kind of treatment of people's dreams
The forum user formerly known as Kangaroo2.
If the appocalypse comes, email me
