Lee Mead: 'Any Dream Will Do'

There's lazy and there's reality show spin-off single lazy. Not only have the lovely chaps at the BBC whisked the winner of Any Dream Will Do straight into the recording studio to belt out the one song from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that the man on the street knows - what inventiveness! - but they seem to have used the same plinky-plonk backing track as Jason Donovan crooned over at the start of the nineties. It's reassuring to know that Auntie's innovation knows no bounds, isn't it?

People's Joseph Lee Mead will sound great projecting to the stalls when he begins his West End run next month, but his vocals are a little too mannered and theatrical on record. You can just picture Andrew Lloyd-Webber eyeballing him in the studio, urging him to "Act out the song, act out the song." The whiff of the sixth form talent show - sweat, cheap make-up and a battered old smoke machine on its last legs - is unmistakable here. Not that the eight million or so souls who watched Mead win Any Dream Will Do are likely to care.