The vapid high school characters and their repetitive storylines felt too much like homework in the second season.

Network Ten constantly changing the timeslot didn’t help.

But it got so that the whiny choir kids and their teachers had nothing new to say each week, except when they were belting out someone else’s lyrics.

The Fleetwood Mac episode was watchable. The bits between the songs, not so much.

But The Glee Project (Eleven, 7.30pm Friday) is giving this lapsed Gleek cause for hope – plus the opportunity to rock out to awesome ’80s hits.

Actually, I’d go so far as to say Glee’s talent quest spin-off is a bracing splatter of purple slushie in the face of the main show.

The Glee Project has 12 real kids competing in musical challenges for the chance to appear in a seven-episode story arc on Glee’s next season.

As Glee’s casting director, choreographer and musical director put the wannabes through their paces, the teens talk to the camera about their dreams and fears and bitch about each other with maximum sass.

As reality show contestants go, they are as precisely cast as any acting ensemble: there’s the short, Artie-like misfit with braces; the fat girl with red hair; the handsome but awkward exchange student from Northern Ireland; the smug, Rachel-esque starlet; and the black gay kid with the voice of an angel who’s 99 per cent Mercedes-style diva.

Ok, so they play like checklist of obvious character types but the emotions they bring ring truer than most of what we’ve been seeing on Glee lately.

Plus they do a mighty rendition of Katy Perry’s Firework.

And how much fun it was the other week to see poor Damian McGinty, the lad from Derry, nervously mangle a Rick Springfield song he’d never heard until two hours before his elimination sing-off.

“I wish that I was Jessie’s girl,” he kept crooning. Oh, what the Glee writers could do with this kid.

And another thing ...