Keith Urban took aim at the “shine blockers” of the world as Channel 7 fired the first shots in the battle of the reality TV juggernauts on Monday night.

The network started The Voice at 7pm, half an hour before MasterChef on Ten and Lego Masters on Nine kicked off their seasons. It delivered a strong debut that was big on laughs, drama and, yes, vocal talent, even if it cycled through just seven blind auditions in almost two hours of television.

Responding to the opening performance by 19-year-old Ally Eley, from the western suburbs of Melbourne, the judges asked why she had chosen to cover the song Teenage Dirtbag, a hit for New York alt-rockers Wheatus in 2000. She explained by telling a story about a teacher whom she had looked up to at primary school, but who responded to her first-ever performance, in front of the class when she was just nine years old, by laughing and saying: “I thought you said you could sing”.

“People talk a lot about the people that encouraged us early on, the cheerleaders in our lives, the believers and all that, and we get a lot of fuel from those people,” Urban said. “But man, we get a lot of fuel from the naysayers, the shine blockers, who say to us ‘you will never amount to anything’.

“In life it’s not what happens to us, it’s how we deal with it,” he added. “Do you know what your music teacher was? She was intimidated and terrified of your talent, and she was very jealous.”

Despite the words of encouragement, she opted to go with Guy Sebastian.

The season debut also featured a hilarious exchange between country singer Danny Phegan and Rita Ora, the show’s Kosovo-born English judge, in which the cultural gap loomed large.

Before his performance, Phegan, a 45-year-old father of six from Walla Walla in outback New South Wales, played down his prospects.