Taking on the stars

Stars In Their Eyes second season debuts on TV One, Tuesday at 8:30pm. Photo / Supplied

If you want to be a rock star, you've got to hurt a few people." With these threatening words, an 18-year-old budding musician is transformed into his bogan rock idol, and a few members of the Stars in their Eyes audience are certainly showing signs of pain. The butter-wouldn't-melt aspirant has talent in spades, and although his roof-lifting vocals aren't everyone's cup of bourbon, his rock'n' roll swagger is pure theatre.

This enthralling performance is just one of the gems in a highly entertaining second season of this water-cooler fodder. The local version of the long-running British reality series returns to our screens this Tuesday, and introduces more rough diamonds to stardom, of sorts. Among the 45 salt-of-the-earth contestants is a caravan-park resident, a paramedic and a man who calls himself "the Billy Elliot of Rangiora". Like last season, all have an excellent measure of singing ability in their own right, but - thankfully - there's a much higher number of jaw-droppingly accurate impersonators than last year and fewer of the mediocre (arguably delusional) aspirants.

Affable What Now? alumni Simon Barnett is again presenting the show.

"There's a lot more talent this year," says producer Shannon Cairns. "A lot more people have applied because the word was out there, and the standard, I feel, is higher.

It's not enough to be able to merely sing well - the show rewards a rare, highly subjective skill, the mirroring of an established star. Equally important is the need to look the part, and that's where hair and make-up magician Paula Taylor and wardrobe maestro Kristin Seth come into play.

These fairy-godmothers are charged with granting the dreams of this pack of star-hopefuls, a process that can take several hours on show day. For almost three months prior, Taylor, TVNZ's head of make-up, researched the stars whose appearance she would be transplanting on to a living canvas.

"You have to get it right," she says emphatically. "You have to really study their looks carefully, their face shapes and hairstyles, what they do within their acts and how you're going to get it to work."

Wigs are the most time-consuming aspect, and Taylor often builds them herself using bought bases. As far as face shape goes, she instructs her team on how best to use the shading powers of make-up to manipulate a round face, for example, into an oblong shape.

Stylist Seth's job also requires exhaustive research. She began scouring vintage shops and costume hire stores in February. For this highly resourceful wardrobe queen, the biggest challenges usually occur at the eleventh hour.

"There was a case of pants splitting five minutes before performing last year," Seth says, recalling Melissa Etheridge's act. One of last season's most memorable outfits was Cher's lacy skin-tight body suit, where a seamstress had "sewn patches around her private parts".

The outrageous result was enough to make Dancing with the Stars sexpot Rachel Burstein, known for her barely-there costumes, look almost demure.

If it's not the costumes that get New Zealand talking, it's the singing itself, and in particular whether the studio audience picked the right winner. As Cairns says, the secret of the show's popularity is its knack for sparking debate. And this year, opinion is power. Stars in their Eyes is now a democracy - instead of a pre-recorded studio audience vote, the public will be choosing the grand winner from home, by text or phone vote.

* Stars In Their Eyes' second season debuts on TV One, Tuesday at 8.30pm.