Your Song review: Even Alison Hammond's mega-watt smile can't save this show from its obsession with the misery business

This new reality music competition is basically The Piano without room in their homes for a keyboard.

It follows the same template as the previous Channel 4 hit, fronted by Claudia Winkleman, but so far without the same emotional impact.

As in The Piano, a cheery non-musical host – this time the walking hug that is Alison Hammond – heads out across the country to find some great amateur singers.

And as in The Piano, two musical luminaries are hidden nearby, watching from a TV screen. For Mika and Jon Batiste, swap in Paloma Faith and Sam Ryder, neither of whom are renowned for their shy and retiring personas.

Quite why they have to be hidden away is never fully explained, as Sam and Pal regularly hotfoot it from their judging cupboard to head for the stage and embrace the contestants.

Unlike The Piano, however, which was charming in its understatement, and seemed to let the pianists and their music breathe, Your Song is determined to shoehorn its format into the works at every opportunity.

Rather than let the songs speak – sing? - for themselves, the performances are talked over at length, interrupted by pre-filmed inserts and interspersed with Alison speaking to people in the crowd watching.

But this is not as troubling as what seems to be the main point of the show – getting people to expose their trauma on national TV and then judging them on it.

It seems that the point of Your Song is not to find good singers, or unearth lost classic tunes, or maybe refresh standards with brand new interpretations.

No. The point of Your Song is to invest each performance with back-story, all the better to work the emotional tear ducts.

So we have kidney disease, a parent's recent death and in one case apparently, simply being a Scouser.

And you know precisely who is in with a chance to the main prize – a slot in a special concert at London's Hackney Empire – because they're the ones with a lengthy VT to introduce them and their story.

All the better to prime us for the hoped-for emotional whammy of the song.

When you can't hear the song for the format, however, it all falls a bit flat and you're left with uncomfortable feeling that it's more about the trauma than the song. That the performers have to earn their chance through hardship, rather than their talent, or their way with a tune, or in some cases their song-writing ability.

And Your Song, being about trauma, means many of the songs are downbeat ballads – by then end you're longing for someone to bring some joy to proceedings.

After all, it's possible to invest heartache and tragedy with a defiant 'up yours' – where's McAlmont and Butler's Yes? Where's I Am What I Am or I Will Survive?

Where's the punchy anger of Olivia Rodrigo's Good 4 U?

As American rockers Paramore might say, Your Song is all about the misery business, and despite the high wattage of the smiles strewn about by Ali, Sam and Pal, it never rises above its conviction that the X Factor was right, and singers these days need a backstory for us to invest in them.

But the point with songs is that we can all take something different from them, the same song can affect us all in different ways and it's the performance that counts.

And that is what Your Song never gives us.