Popstar to Operastar; Slumdog Secret Millionaire

But Darius wasn’t the only frisson. The Pied Piper who organises reality TV line-ups has had a few off-days lately (see last year’s Strictly) so this was some crop of singers: proper legends (Little Jimmy Osmond!), people still in the charts (the Saturdays’ Vanessa) and the odd quirk-curveball (Marcella Detroit, last seen screeching over a near-corpse while the other Shakespears Sister pulled off a mean Edward Scissorhands impression).

How quickly those potential bangs were joined by wimpers as the (red velvet) curtain came up to introduce your host . . . “Alan Titchmarsh . . .” Yes, he likes opera, but he’s hardly Dermot O’Leary, eh? And, with his co-host Myleene Klass in place, what they unravelled was more of a mixed bag than an eccentric school fête’s tombola table — for every high a low; for every designer dress a can of “off” corned beef — to the extent that I wondered if this was a Brechtian exercise in jolting reality TV fans from an accept-anything slumber.

The judges: Katherine was, of course, quiet and competent. And Rolando. Rolando Villazon! The Mexican tenor is an early contender for TV Find of 2010, sweating pure passion as he chased Little Jimmy around like an unhinged Fraggle to explain the point of opera. But Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen? Qualified because he likes opera too and looks rather dandy? Meat Loaf’s qualifications? He once sang with Pavarotti — and obviously attended the David Hasselhoff School for Erratic Panellists, stretching his arms and barking: “That dog was hunting!” (He also added to the show’s accidental comedy credentials as Titchmarsh repeatedly called him Meat, as if his surname were Loaf. Oh, Alan.) More absurdity piled on courtesy of the set. Was this all just an excuse to recycle the props from ITV’s beleaguered drama department? The chaise longue from Marple, we’ll use it for Vanessa Saturday’s O Mio Babbino Caro. Those fusty curtains from Poirot, Jimmy will have a jacket from them. The lipsticks from Secret Diary of a Call Girl, they’ll do for Myleene — they don’t match her dress but no matter. And how about some big bling letters centre-stage spelling OPERA — subliminal programming to make folks think that they really like opera.

And there’s the rub: because, dare I say it, doesn’t the Friday night reality crowd tend to want something easy (I know I do)? And isn’t opera quite — hard — especially when it’s sung this badly? I know, look what Strictly did for the foxtrot, but if you’re going to try that trick I’d like to learn a bit more — about what the arias mean; about the tricks the singers need to reach Nessun Dorma’s climactic “Vin-ce-ro, vin-ceeeeee-ro!” (Darius did it, with the help of enough transposition to alienate the other potential audience, true opera buffs. Bless him though, still just the cheesy side of cool.) And it’s hard to think how the format can’t get even more bizarre. If, in the opening week, they’ve been through the compilation album Opera Songs People Know Well Enough to Watch, what will they sing next week, the Lloyds TSB ad with the screechy bits in it?

If you can measure the success of each Secret Millionaire episode by how quickly it makes you cry, then Sunday’s Slumdog special lived up to its extreme billing — I welled up one minute in as the British entrepreneur Seema Sharma visited the slums of Mumbai and found that her Indian roots weren’t all Bollywood glitz. Those who find the format tasteless will have found here a more acute basis for their claims — as Sharma, all ballet pumps and big shades, clambered over sites that resembled a post-apocalyptic film, all steam rising from expanses of crumpled corrugated iron.

But this extreme also brought out a series-first for me — shouting at the TV. I’m not of the “it’s tasteless” school and I admire Sharma for highlighting that Danny Boyle’s film setting is far from fiction and investing to improve it. But if her biggest revelation was that she’d been an “ostrich” about poverty in India, then her biggest oversight was not helping to wrench others out of their head-in-sand positions.

One of her family members in Delhi, BlackBerry in hand, spoke casually, laughingly, about the slumdwellers, even suggesting that the savage conditions of the rubbish-scavenging industry were OK — at least it’s not prostitution. Yet Sharma didn’t donate to a homelessness charity whose main aim was to help India’s middle classes to understand the scale of deprivation and integrate the heavily polarised layers of society. For me, that was the biggest tear-jerker of the lot.