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Talent in a Previous Life

Because It's Never Just About the Music

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Competition Time! 

We have a confession to make. Despite our well known - and currently under investigation - love for Miss Nicola Roberts we never actually bothered watching the TV series which made her a star, Popstars: The Rivals. This was down to the fact that we felt quite let down by the results of both the original Popstars program and by Pop Idol - though we have since eaten our words about the latter when it turned out that Will Young was actually quite good after all - so it was quite galling to hear Sound of the Underground and realise that we'd missed out on the genesis of the most genius girl group to ever exist, even more so once we actually saw a picture of Girls Aloud and caught sight of the flame haired maiden for the first time.

Since then we've occasionally toyed with the idea of buying the DVD of the series to discover the true story of just how the other girls were lucky enough to be picked to join Nicola's band, but we were loathe to pay £20 for it and, despite constantly scouring the sales racks, it never seemed to find its way into the reduced stock section, so you can imagine our joy when, last week, we wandered into one of those High Street Book Clearance stores - you know, the ones which show a total disregard for the concept of literature by selling books by weight - and discovered, lurking amongst the copies of soap opera spin-offs and rubbish sitcoms, a number of copies of Popstars: The Rivals on old-fashioned VHS for the princely sum on £1.50.

We've since watched it and, to be honest, we are slightly disappointed with the Nicola content on show. Indeed, there's a lot more of the other red-headed finalist, Chloe Staines on the tape than of Nicola, leading us to believe that whoever put this tape together was told that a ginger got into the final and promptly focused on the wrong one. Even so, we still get to see 20 seconds of her doing Shout and most of her performance of I'm So Excited which means that this release contains more soloness from her than Girls Aloud's entire debut album.

Anyway, so excited are we by the cheapness of this release that we've decided to go back out tomorrow and buy a second copy of the tape which we're going to give away to one lucky reader in our very first Talent in a Previous Life Competition. How exciting! Be warned though, while the tale of how 1.2 excellent pop groups got together (The fifth is represented by Phixx) is undoubtedly an enticing and top quality draw, the video does also contain the following:-If, despite all that, you still want to win then all you need to do is e-mail talentinapreviouslife@gmail.com with a subject of "Rivals" telling us which popstar you reckon you could have in a fight and why, and we'll award the prize to our favourite answer. Points will be awarded for creativity, but as the prize is only worth £1.50 we don't expect you to try too hard. Closing date for entries is Friday 21st January and this competition is only open to UK residents, partly because due to different standards and whatnot the video probably won't work outside of these shores, but mainly because we're skinflints and reckon that the postage would be astronomical. Our decision is final and any disputes will be settled in the pub car park just after closing time.

Good luck!

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