Murtzcellanious: LIVE Canadian Idol Recap – August 4

Shows

Time for another performance show.

The theme this week was “UK Hits.” There must have been a slight alteration to the “British Invasion” theme that I thought it was, but it was still the same thing.

This week, the Idols were tutored by the legendary Tom Jones. I have to say that I was more curious about this show than any other because I wanted to see how Jones would impact the singers if they were not performing standard hits and instead chose rock songs (as I expected them to).

When I got the song list, I was surprised to see that Mark Day would be leading things off as Theo Tams closed the show last week, so I presumed that he would be starting this week. Oh well.

Mark Day sang “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis. I am a BIG fan of this song and while I was excited to hear it, I wasn’t sure how I felt about listening to Day’s take on it. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised. I think that more than anyone else, Newfoundland’s only representative still is struggling to find his true identity in the competition. He has sung hokey songs (“Dancing In The Streets”) and somber ones (“Dance With My Father”). This was the first performance where I felt he actually found his proverbial voice and I was impressed. It was very obvious to me that Day loved what he was singing. The judges didn’t seem to agree as Jake said that he “didn’t think it was a winning performance” and Zack joked that he wanted to give Mark, “the Tom Jones salute by throwing my panties on stage.”

Mitch MacDonald sang the John Lennon classic “Jealous Guy” and did the Gavin DeGraw version. I thought it was horrible and must use the awful cliché of the other guys not being jealous of his performance. Haha. It’s fine… I laughed, even if you didn’t. Mitch has got to go home this week.

Drew Wright chose a brilliant song for the third week in a row and I am now officially going on the record as saying that Drew Wright is the smartest Idol contestant of all-time as far as song selection goes. The only one who I think can even compare is Jacob Hoggard from season 2. This week, Drew performed “Creep” by Radiohead. It’s one of my favorite songs and the crowd was into it IMMEDIATELY. The weird thing was that I totally think there were some technical issues during the song (which I have never seen on Canadian Idol before). I am not sure what you thought if you saw it on TV, but I just thought some of the lighting effects went off a little early and caught Drew by surprise. While it didn’t affect his performance at all (I thought he did a perfect job), I am still curious to see if you guys noticed anything. Give me a shout if you did.

What else is there to say about Theo Tams, other than the fact that he is probably the 2008 Canadian Idol? He delivered another winner on Monday with Joss Stone’s “You Had Me.” It was awesome and Theo gave voters a different look because as he expressed to Tom Jones in his opening video package, he wanted to perform the song instead of just sing it behind his piano. He rocked the house and all the judges basically told him he had won the competition.

The wicked performances only continued with Mookie Morris’ version of “Lola” by The Kinks and Amberly Thiessen’s cover of Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On.” Mookie was flawless this week as he chose the perfect song for his voice and finally is starting to make Murtz a believer. While I think that Carly Rae Jepsen’s version of the Bailey Rae song was better last season, Amberly still did an admirable job.

Earl closed out the show with Eric Clapton’s “Change The World.” I hated it. Earl kept twitching around on stage and it just made me feel uncomfortable. I think that Earl has abilities. But he has been nothing but inconsistent to me.

So that’s it. Predicted bottom 3? We’ll go with Mitch, Drew and Mookie. I think Earl should be there, but don’t think he will be. I think Mitch will be taking the walk.

See you tomorrow.

Murtz Jaffer is the world's foremost reality television expert and was the host of Reality Obsessed which aired on the TVTropolis and Global Reality Channels in Canada. He has professional writing experience at the Toronto Sun, National Post, TV Guide Canada, TOROMagazine.com and was a former producer at Entertainment Tonight Canada. He was also the editor at Weekendtrips.com.