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Next stop for Susan Boyle? A lonely hotel room and a £500-a-night tour
By ALISON BOSHOFF
Mail

Britain's Got Talent bosses face probe over Susan Boyle's 'emotional breakdown'
By PAUL REVOIR
Mail

Deborah Orr: Talent is never enough – you need grit to survive celebrity

Susan Boyle is by no means the first famous entertainer to beat a retreat to the Priory. But she has certainly moved from discovery to exhaustion with exceptional alacrity. Poor lady. It was all too much for her.

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No wonder. "It" was always savage. From the beginning, the "novelty" of Boyle was that she did not look or act like she could sing (however that looks), but could. The audience and the judges in Britain's Got Talent were all geared up to have a laugh at Boyle's expense until she opened her mouth and confounded her would-be critics. They didn't even bother to hide their ignorant prejudice.

If Boyle had not been correct in her own assessment of her singing ability, her public humiliation would have been brief, but it would have been public humiliation nonetheless. That, apparently, is wholesome family entertainment. It is why Simon Cowell's talent shows depart from the shows of the past, and make a great fuss about broadcasting auditions.

Instead of ridicule, Boyle attracted curiosity – lots of it. A dotty, homely, middle-aged woman was very good at something. Hold the front page. Boyle's back-story – a lonely lifetime in a small village, given purpose in her isolation by her local church – promised a wonderful tale of triumph over adversity. What, exactly, that adversity might be, was paid little heed.

Why, after all, would the media encroach on a woman's privacy, by plastering that she had learning difficulties on their front pages? That might have interfered with a schedule that involved encroaching on her privacy in the usual way, by hanging around her home taking photographs, and publishing those showing her with her trouser zip unfastened.

And why would the executives at Britain's Got Talent have asked the media to lay off either? Boyle's appearance – in both senses – was getting them international attention. What canny television apparatchik would have risked complicating such golden publicity? Much better to let the "fairy-tale" run, and let the whole world believe that Boyle's sudden fame was a triumph of the extraordinary-ordinary, a home-spun comment on how obsessed the silly entertainment industry is with youth, glamour and surface, instead of sheer, raw talent.

But here's the sting. Being exceptionally good at what you do is only a little part of the complicated business of being famous. That's why so many people achieve fame without, seemingly, being terribly much good at anything. That's why, at 48, Boyle was still languishing in West Lothian dreaming her dreams.

You do have to be reasonably attractive to be in the public eye, especially if you are female. If you are not, it will be made an issue of, not just by the media but also by potential audiences.

If you have a very strong character, you may be able to withstand such criticism. A strong character can mean all sorts of things. But it helps to be single-minded, hard-working, determined, resourceful, willing to put up with disappointments, focused, confident, socially adept, charming, able to create an impression, manipulative, shrewd, opportunistic or able to identify and follow good advice.

You can have many of these qualities, and depending on how much you have of some, you can get away without quite a number of others – providing you don't much mind ending up in the Priory sometimes yourself, or becoming a monster of egotism. When someone becomes justly celebrated, but is clearly still decent, unaffected and "normal", we recognise that this is truly remarkable.

Life, let alone "the pressures of fame", is too tough, and competitive and ruthless for fragile people, whatever their talents may be. It was always a nasty trick – against not just Boyle but against her naive supporters as well – to pretend that matters are otherwise. It will be a great thing if Boyle can salvage an interesting future that she can cope with from the ruins of her 15 minutes. Plenty before her have not.
Independent

Janet Street-Porter: 'Jeopardy' – television's crack cocaine

I only tuned into to the last 10 minutes of the Britain's Got Talent final, and even that tiny bit of blood sport made me feel extremely guilty. Surprising really, as I've created and produced quite a bit of television, and appeared in reality shows, starting with I'm a Celebrity... in 2004.

The reason I felt slightly nauseous watching on Saturday night was because I had succumbed to the drug that the makers of these shows spoon-feed us until we are completely hooked. It's called "jeopardy" by telly insiders, and over the past few years it has been ramped up into a gladiatorial sport. Jeopardy is the crack cocaine of popular television. Once you've tuned in, you just can't switch off. It's that long-drawn out moment where finalists or contestants stand there sweating and quaking and trembling in the spotlight like fragile butterflies on pins waiting to hear their fate. This brinkmanship has been turned into an exquisite form of torture which most viewers are transfixed by, and Ant and Dec are its best proponents.

You'll know exactly what I mean, as jeopardy now constitutes a major element in almost every factual series on the box. It's the process of elimination, and it is carefully stage-managed, right down to the music, the long drawn-out pauses, and the use of phrases like "It MIGHT be you". It's a key part of popular shows like The Apprentice, Big Brother and MasterChef. The list gets longer every week.

I took part in a reality series for ITV2 a couple of years back called Deadline, in which I edited a magazine helped by a motley bunch of celebs. The format dictated that I fired someone every single week. The ritual was completely formulaic. My helpers were summoned to the boardroom and I was given a very carefully written script to wind them up as much as possible before delivering my nasty verdict. It made the remaining few pathetically grateful they were being allowed to participate for another week, and a kind of hysterical euphoria ensued.

In the I'm A Celebrity... jungle, all contestants are ordered to gather around the campfire for the arrival of Ant and Dec, which is shown live in the UK. Sometimes you are kept waiting for ages (no one is allowed a watch) and tempers become frayed and people get very impatient. Hidden cameras are trained on your face in extreme close-up.

When the perky pair finally arrive, they hold cards with your fate on it close to their chest. Then they go right through each anxious celebrity, winding them up, until one person is finally evicted. And you submit to the same process the very next day.

Looking at Susan Boyle on Saturday night, it was perfectly obvious in an instant that she was unable to cope with the elimination ritual, and several of the children looked very uncomfortable too. I sometimes think programme-makers will only be happy when someone actually wets themselves on camera or starts screaming.

I don't buy that it's necessary to punish people like this in order to make shows more exciting. The process has got out of hand. I very was surprised that BGT did not employ a psychiatrist to assess the finalists and screen out those unable to cope. Mind you, most reality shows put together a team of participants who will tick various boxes. One must always be very erratic, temperamental, and about to freak out. A couple of the others must loathe each other on sight.

BGT finalists are chosen by the public, but what they are asked to go through in the studio in front of a huge audience far exceeds the demands of a normal talent show. In the jungle, all the contestants are screened by psychiatrists beforehand (for some reason I wasn't, probably because I was considered a professional who knew the score).

But they still regularly choose people who are very vulnerable. Sophie Anderton had only left rehab a few weeks earlier, and Brian Harvey (who was sacked from East 17 for making alleged comments about drugs) had to be removed from the show after a couple of days when he lost the plot and started ranting about wanting crates of mineral water. He subsequently tried to commit suicide, and then managed to run over himself when he fell out of his own car. Earlier this year he told an interviewer he was "as low as you can get".

Time and again on reality shows you see people who've got serious mental issues or addictions, and although programme-makers claim they have psychiatrists and counsellors on standby should anything go wrong, it's debatable whether that is good enough.

We have certainly come a long way since Hughie Green's Opportunity Knocks, with people playing the spoons and the wonderfully kitsch Musical Muscle Man, and it's good to see BGT is a programme which whole families will enjoy together – a rare commodity these days. Susan Boyle needed support and counselling from the start, but I suspect someone on the production team thought it would be good telly to allow her to go all the way.

It isn't enough to give people a friend or two to hang out with during rehearsals and a posh hotel room. We are taking ordinary people and subjecting them to an unacceptable form of bullying. And it ought to be reined in.
Independent