Filipino singer receives standing ovation from X Factor UK judges

This article’s point is fairly simple: a Filipino singer named Sephy Francisco received a standing ovation from X Factor UK 2018 judges for her chilling rendition of Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli’s “The Prayer”. It goes on to quote a few of the judges’ responses: Simon Cowell calls her audition “incredible”, and Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, a popular British boyband, exclaims that “really uplifted,”.

I picked this article because in a sea of headlines on the Manila Bulletin website, the X Factor was something I was vaguely familiar with. The content of the article is not rich with detail or thought-provoking ideas, but it did make me think about fame in the Philippines. There had to have been a certain pride to some Filipinos to see one of their own people on an international stage, garnering attention on a mainstream television show that reached so many viewers from across the world—a Singaporean like me would also know of this reality-competition show. Yet, it made me wonder how much of Franciso’s “success” could be attributed to the accessibility of her performance to her English-Speaking audiences as opposed to her Filipino one.

The judges of the show were successes in mainstream English pop music, or famous critics (who has not heard of Simon Cowell and his mean antics on American Idol?) on reality competition television series. The song that Francisco sang was an English-Italian number that spoke to her Catholic faith. Her live-television audience was presumably mostly English people who were also there for their own audition. What if she had displayed the same “duo voice”—the ability to display a remarkable vocal range to mimic both and male and female voices in the duet— that her judges were so in awe of, but had done it in Filipino instead? Arguably, it would be closer to her own identity as a Filipino woman and it would certainly make her more relatable to her listeners back home, but would she even warrant a second look from the producers of the show? Would her Filipino identity hold her back in the rest of the competition such that her only place in the competition is as a marketing tool for the show in the form of a viral video showcasing the “foreign talent” the X-Factor was attracting? Language, ethnicity and nationality factor so much into the success of Francisco’s audition, though most would not even think twice about it…