I’m not one of those bullies who looked at Susan Boyle’s audition on "Britain's Got Talent" and went, “Harumph! She’s nowhere as good as Elaine Paige, whoever that is, how dare she aim so high.” Though I did later learn from Letty Cottin Pogrebin in one of Huffington Post’s multitudinous articles on Susan’s triumph that Elaine is “the First Lady of the British Musical Theater.”
I cried each time I watched the audition, just like Demi M and Patti LP, and even teared up when I was only thinking about it.
But the backlash has begun, and not wanting to miss out on a trend (e.g., I joined Twitter two years ago but barely posted till I found out everybody else was), I’ve revisited the questions in the back of my mind from the start:
Were the audience putdowns edited in later for effect? Did the judges know in advance they had a star on their hands and played it for all it’s worth?
In search of the truth, I followed Drudge’s link to Susan Boyle Is Not a Very Good Singer, Calm Down Everybody at Mirror.co.uk, where blogger Rob Leigh says she was off key. Not so, argue commenters who swear they have perfect pitch.
Drudge also led me to Maureen Callahan’s New York Post rant, Why Is No One Suspicious of Simon Cowell’s Latest Creation, where the closest she gets to proof of shenanigans is her reasoning that “there is the profound desire for this entire thing to be authentic, which in and of itself suggests that it probably isn't.”
But I wasn’t looking for opinions. Was it a setup or not?
At MovieLine.com, Kyle Buchannan’s Enough Already With This Susan Boyle Thing charges, as if he knows for sure, that the producers “wildly stack the deck emotionally for her trotting Susan out and editing her as though she…hasn’t already survived at least 10 audition rounds in front of the show’s creator/producers, one of whom is the head judge, Simon Cowell.”
Kyle goes on about “weirdly mixed in catcalls and ADR’d skeptical laughter” and that “shot of some girl rolling her eyes, and if you know reality TV at all, she definitely rolled her eyes at that exact moment and not some other moment during the four hours of taping that the producers just spliced in to kickstart their segment’s narrative.”
The show doesn’t hide that it’s edited. Interview clips are pre-recorded by necessity and, according to Wikipedia, 2007 "BGT" sensation Paul Potts’s audition performance of Puccini’s "Nessun Dorma" was cut poorly enough for a detail-oriented opera fan to tell.
But as much of a surprise as Paul's voice was to the audience, there were no winces before they heard him sing, no titters -- just a condescending grin from judge Piers Morgan, an impatient sigh from Simon as the music begins and no expectations whatever on third judge Amanda Holden’s face. A moment later Paul sings, Simon perks up and a star is born.
