(July 2009)
Call me a cynic, but there’s something very suspicious about the Susan Boyle phenomenon.
Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last month or so, you’ll have heard about Susan – the frumpy, middle-aged Scottish spinster who shot to stardom in the face of ridicule on the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent.”
When she appeared on the stage, the suppressed giggles from the audience in that Glasgow theatre and the patronising questions from Simon Cowell, the main judge on the show, prepared everyone for a bit of a laugh-fest.
Her frizzy hair, dumpy figure and plain features hid the fact that she had a beautiful singing voice, and when she launched into a song from “Les Miserables” the sudden shock that resounded around the auditorium, followed by a standing ovation, soon reverberated around the world, and an instant star was born.
There have been over 50 million hits on YouTube videos of her performance, and the media are now beating a path to her door in the backwaters of Scotland to try and gain an interview, with predictions already being made that she’ll soon have a number one album on the charts.
Watch her performance here ... if you haven't seen it already!
Good for her, and shame on people like Simon Cowell and the “Britain’s Got Talent” audience that night for judging a book by its cover and apparently not expecting a silk purse to emerge from a sow’s ear.
But, looking at the whole thing realistically, are they expecting us to believe that the judges on that show had absolutely no inkling that Susan Boyle had a fantastic voice? Somebody or other would have heard her singing beforehand at prior auditions, well before she appeared on the show, and I simply can’t believe that Cowell and the other judges hadn’t already either heard her themselves, or been forewarned about what was coming.
It was good theatre for them to mock Susan before she started to sing. The raised eyebrows and snide look from Cowell as she told him she was aged 47 was enough to gee up the audience and get them to jump on the wagon and join in with the suppressed ridicule.
And then – suddenly – it was all amazement from the judges as she started to sing “I Dreamed A Dream” … and once this amazing transition had hit the media, it was a guaranteed couple of million more viewers for the remainder of the series as people tuned in to see if she could win the whole shebang.
Clever stuff, but nothing new in the shallow world of entertainment makeovers where there’s very little room for the truth, and where people are regularly manipulated in the chase for the almighty dollar. The problem is, people like Susan Boyle – an innocent, suddenly at large in the shark pool of media stardom - can be damaged in the process, as their money-making potential is relentlessly exploited by agents and entrepreneurs. Let’s hope her down-to-earth, no-nonsense personality helps her to insulate herself from the cynical exploitation that’s sure to follow.
(By 2019 the ‘old’ Susan Boyle and gone and the new one had emerged):
And then there’s Kellie Crawford, an Australian television personality who’s recently decided to change her image from one incarnation – where she was a member of a children’s entertainment group called ‘Hi-5’ – to another … a sultry, semi-clothed seductress on the front cover of Ralph Magazine.
It’s created a turmoil of criticism, with parents saying she’s betrayed the children who’ve grown up with her television shows, and with others saying she’s suddenly become something of a tart.
What she does with her life, I guess, is her business but it seems a shame that someone with natural beauty, such as she has, should be airbrushed into something that she probably isn’t, and displayed as nothing more than a sexualised image for frustrated Aussie men.
It’s all a part of the cynical entertainment industry, and it happens all over the world. The truth is often either hidden or distorted by cosmetic – or digital – surgery and, like so many other things to do with the media, one never knows what’s truth and what’s fiction.
And here’s an example of how they airbrush away the truth: