No fairytale end to Susan Boyle’s Disney story (From Gazette & Herald)

No fairytale end to Susan Boyle’s Disney story

3:26pm Wednesday 3rd June 2009

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OH deary me! What do you get if you put a dowdy church warden who has never been kissed in front of the collective demographic of Heat Magazine for a week?

If we’re honest, the ‘Hairy Angel’, and the baying masses were hardly going to be a match made in heaven.

So it’s no wonder that the Susan Boyle story ended as less of a fairytale and more of a cautionary fable against the pitfalls of fame.

Susan was pipped to the post by a dance troupe after a week of speculation on whether she could cope with the pressure of being one of YouTube’s most downloadable ladies. But Saturday’s final was just the last nail in the coffin for the unfortunate Scot.

When the world first registered Ms Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, she was hailed as the antidote to the shallow age – the epitome of raw and unexploited talent.

She sashayed on to stage, juggled her hips in the manner of that crazy old aunty that turns up to family dos, and elicited hearty laughter from an audience whose idea of talent was based on who had the flattest stomach or the biggest breasts.

But then she got her moment – she sang and the crowd shut up. No, the crowd stood up, in a cringey Disney-sque display of triumph over adversity.

Through her wonderful voice she had moved this most discerning of audiences to an ovation. Is there anything one can’t overcome with true talent, we wondered? And then came the humble apologies of the judges, who, one by one professed to learning a valuable life lesson from Susan – that books shouldn’t be judged by their covers.

They had thought she looked worthless, but it turned out she had a good singing voice so they quickly re-evaluated and recalculated and decided that actually, no, she was worth something after all.

Simon Cowell’s eyes practically glistened with dollar signs. And this is where the whole thing sadly comes undone. Their cheerful message was horribly undermined by the underlying assumption that if she couldn’t sing then they would have been vindicated in their nasty little judgements on the woman – it was only her voice that lifted her out of the cess pool that they had originally conceived for her.

And now people are surprised when a woman who, for near on 50 years has been confined to the category of second-rate by most people who met her, can’t cope with the pressure when she is suddenly turned into a deity.

This stinks. Thousands of kids watch Britain’s Got Talent and what can they take from this programme? The fact that if you have a hint of talent you’ll be gobbled up and spat back out by the big cogs of popularity. Or the fact that in this world, there’s no room for the average Joes, and to be written off is jolly well all you deserve. Either way, this ain’t no Disney story.

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