Sir Elton John says TV talent shows are a “shortcut to disaster” for budding musicians.

The award-winning singer-songwriter, whose career has spanned four decades, believes the public has reached “saturation” point with shows like The X Factor and The Voice.

"Television is not a good way to have a start of a career. It's a shortcut to fame and it's also a shortcut to disaster," he told the BBC.

"When you win the X Factor you have a year until it's the next person, and then you get dropped.”

He added, “The proof of the pudding is The Voice. The single didn't get into the top forty, they've cancelled the live tour."

Sir Elton also spoke of his love for his son Zachary, who was born via a surrogate in America on Christmas Day 2010, and revealed he and his civil partner David Furnish would like to have another child.

The 65-year-old star had once believed he was too selfish to have children. "It proves you're never right all the time. I haven't loved a human being more than him, ever,” he said.

Speaking in a separate interview about his memoir Love is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of Aids, Sir Elton admitted that he felt like the “luckiest man in the world” after surviving drug addiction at a time when people were dying of Aids.

"I wasted such a big part of my life, when this epidemic was beginning to happen in the early 1980s," he said on NBC's Today Show.

"I was a drug addict and self-absorbed. I was having people die right, left, and centre around me, friends. And yet I didn’t stop the life that I had. I was consumed by cocaine, booze and who knows what else."

He added, "I came out of this HIV-negative. I was the luckiest man in the world."