Quickfire: Endemol creative director Tim Hincks says lessons have been learnt from the firstFame Academy series that would benefit viewers snd the students this time. (Forum).

Do you consider the "Shame Academy" jibes directed at the first series to be unfair?

I don't think we'd be making a second series of Fame Academy if the first one wasn't considered to be a success. The series as a whole was unprecedented in terms of delivering a young audience to the BBC. It brought the highest share of 16- to 34-year-olds to the BBC for some time, which was the aim from the outset. The Comic Relief show delivered 13.8m viewers and the series was the biggest ever show on BBC Choice. The fact that Comic Relief, such an important part of the BBC's schedule, was given over to Fame Academy shows how proud it is of the show.

Are you concerned about the level of album sales the performers from the first series of Fame Academy (David Sneddon, Sinead Quinn, Ainslie Henderson) have achieved to date?

I'm not worried, because we aren't trying to create an overnight success. The challenge for the show is not to produce a boy band or short-lived pop star; others might like to take up that challenge. It's about people that write their own material and are all-round performers. This second series is about raising the bar on the quality of talent on the programme.

Did the way the students were selected for the first ...