An eight-minute clip of 11-year-old identical twins Andrea and Shanice singing “Faith” drew more than 131,000 views within two days of The Voice Kids UK posting it to its official YouTube channel on Saturday, October 17. The performance is not new. It aired on ITV1 on July 8, 2023, and the sisters from Leicester won that series one week later.
The upload’s title, “Twins Who Sound Like One Singer With Two Microphones!”, sells a gimmick. The more interesting story is what the audition led to, and what has happened to the show since.
Three turns, one team, one title
Three of the four coaches turned for them during the blind audition: will.i.am, Ronan Keating and Danny Jones. Pixie Lott, the panel’s most successful coach with four winners, did not. The twins chose will.i.am, came through the battles round and won the July 15, 2023 final with “A Sky Full of Stars.” They were the first duo to win the British children’s edition, and it was will.i.am’s first winner on that show after six series without one.
Their audition song, “Faith,” was the lead single from the soundtrack of the 2016 animated film Sing, with Stevie Wonder on lead vocals and Ariana Grande featured, written by Ryan Tedder, Benny Blanco and Francis Farewell Starlite. It earned a Golden Globe nomination for best original song. It came out in November 2016, when the twins would have been about four years old.
The last series so far
The twins’ series is still the most recent one. ITV said on July 29, 2023 that The Voice Kids was “taking a break” in 2024 while it worked on the adult show and Voice-branded specials, and no eighth series has aired since. Across seven runs from 2017, the format took singers aged 7 to 14, with winners receiving prize money and a family holiday; the 2023 champions got a trip to Universal Orlando Resort in Florida.
The audience numbers tell part of the story. The 2023 series ran three episodes and averaged 2.74 million UK viewers, against 3.91 million for the 2022 series. That is a fall of about 30% in a year (2.74 divided by 3.91 is 0.70), and it made the twins’ series the least watched of the seven. ITV’s statement about the pause did not mention ratings.
That context explains the upload. With no new series to promote, the show’s channel is recycling its strongest moments, and a three-chair audition by a pair who went on to win is about as strong as its archive gets.
The clip: worth the wait, if you know to wait
The edit runs 8 minutes and 3 seconds, and the singing does not start until roughly the 2:40 mark. Before that come introductions, family interviews and backstage nerves; after it, about three minutes of coach pitches and the twins questioning the panel before they decide. Viewers who came for the voices spend more than half the clip waiting for them or hearing them discussed.
When the song arrives, the coaches’ praise in the clip centers on the sisters’ harmonies, which quietly undercuts the title. Harmony means two distinct vocal lines fitting together, which is the opposite of sounding like a single singer.
The bigger omission is the date. Nothing in the title says the footage is from 2023, so a viewer who never opens the description could take it for a new audition from a current series. The description does say the sisters “go on to become the first duo to win the show,” which is accurate and is the only place the clip admits how old it is. The July 15, 2023 final in which they won remains the last episode of The Voice Kids UK to air.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: The Voice Kids (British TV series)
- Wikipedia: The Voice Kids (British TV series) series 7
- Wikipedia: Faith (Stevie Wonder song)
Image: Xuthoria, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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