Authors: John McShane
The demand from across the Atlantic to watch her sing – President’s wife Michelle Obama was said to be desperate to see her again – meant ITV had arranged for it to be streamed onto the internet within minutes of it appearing on television. British theme pubs in the States were arranging SuBo parties so that customers could watch her on widescreen while they downed their drinks.
The public voted Susan into the finals, and dance group Diversity and ten-year-old Natalie Okri received the next biggest share of the public vote and had to face the judges’ decision. Amanda Holden threw her weight behind Natalie, but Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan voted for the dancers.
More than 200 people watched Susan sing her way to the finals from the community centre in Blackburn and local councillor Alison Kerr, who organised the event, said the hall erupted in ‘pandemonium’ as soon as she appeared on screen. ‘The atmosphere was absolutely electric, really fantastic,’ she said.
‘She was so confident tonight and her voice was absolutely wonderful. The minute she was announced the place went into complete pandemonium; it was incredible. As soon as she started to sing everyone went quiet, though – she sounded so fantastic.’
Supporters had decked the hall out in banners and bunting to help create a party atmosphere at the hall where Susan’s performance was shown on a big screen.
Mrs Kerr said, ‘The hall looks fantastic, all decked out in St Andrew’s flag bunting and posters. We were optimistic that she was going to get this far. It’s been all hands on deck. This is the biggest party Blackburn has ever seen – heaven knows what the town will be like for the final. Susan has done the whole town proud and there was not a single soul who wasn’t watching the telly.’
Kerr – who was at the party with daughter Andrea, 17, and pal Stephanie Nicol, 18 – added, ‘The place was a ghost town. If they weren’t at our party they were at home in front of the TV.’
Next-door neighbour Teresa Miller, 36, said, ‘We hear her singing all the time through the wall. No matter what happens on the show now she is going to be a star all over the world. It’s weird to think people will be paying fortunes to see her perform now yet we can hear her all the time. It’s wonderful for Susan – she deserves her success.’
Nursery nurse Michelle McCabe, who also lived nearby, had a poster up supporting Susan. ‘We got our window decorated yesterday and buzzing is not the word. She asked me to look after her cat Pebbles when she went to the audition in Glasgow but that seemed ages ago and we can hardly believe what’s happened. We were watching it on a big telly in the house with a bottle of bubbly ready.’
Friend Jackie Russell added, ‘Susan was lonely before this happened to her. Everyone needs a cuddle and she doesn’t have that. She goes home alone at night to her cat, but she’s got friends and good neighbours and good family. I’m sure there will be male gold-diggers after her now, but she’s no fool. She’s not as stupid as people are making out.’
Even Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond commented, saying, ‘She has Scotland behind her. I’m sure she’s got what it takes to be a winner in next week’s final.’
Bookmaker William Hill cut her odds of winning to 8/13, the shortest price in the show’s history. But if the bookies reckoned she was almost home and dry, not all of her fellow contestants did. Finalist Shaun Smith said that he did not think she was a certainty to win the competition. The 17-year-old singer said he thought all the contestants had a chance of winning. ‘Everyone has a chance, every act is absolutely amazing, no one can second guess this competition because anything can happen. Any of tonight’s acts, such as Stavros Flatley, could come out and give the performance of their lives and all of sudden they could be the favourites,’ he said.
Asked who he thought posed the biggest competition to him, Shaun said, ‘Everyone. It’s such a level playing field, everyone is so talented it’s unreal’, although he did admit to admiring Susan’s singing. ‘I think she’s absolutely amazing, her voice is astonishing,’ he said.
‘The whole point of the show is to give people a shot at something. I would not have had this opportunity if it
wasn’t for
Britain’s Got Talent
. I’d still be a 17-year-old sitting his biology exam absolutely bricking it… You’ve got all these normal people who need a break and they’re finally getting one; that’s the best thing about it.’
The 14 million people who tuned in to see Susan meant ITV had an audience share of 54 per cent that evening, proof of the show’s popularity.
In an interview with Susan posted on the ITV website, she said: ‘I’m feeling really good because it was a totally unexpected result.’ She said she had overcome an uncertain start to her performance. ‘It was a fairly rocky start to begin with, because to begin with I sort of had a croaky note, but that was because I had a cold. I said to myself, “Well, you’d better just pick yourself up and keep going.” So all I did was just keep going and after that it just got better. The audience reaction was really stunning.’
The show was ‘completely different’ from her audition, she said, adding, ‘The pressure was really on me, but you tend to ignore the fact that other people are watching and just concentrate on what’s happening in the here and now in that particular studio.’
Not everyone, however, seemed to be in the grip of SuBo mania. Singer Lily Allen, for one. She said on Twitter that 12-year-old Shaheen Jafargholi was more talented than Susan.
The 24-year-old pop singer wrote on her Twitter feed: ‘I thought that Susan Boyle’s timing was off on
Britain’s Got Talent
on Sunday – no control, and I don’t think she
has an amazing voice. She can sing, Michael Bublé, but it is not about real talent with her, is it? She seems like a lovely lady, but if the show is about talent then that Shaheen kid should win.’
She also said: ‘I think
Britain’s Got Talent
is verging on child cruelty. That poor little Natalie girl.’
She stood by her views the next day when she ‘Tweeted’, ‘It seems I am not alone. I’d say 90 per cent of you are agreeing with me. And by the way, overrated is not the same as bad.’
The young singer wasn’t the only one who had critical views on Susan.
Strictly Come Dancing
Judge Craig Revel Horwood was quoted as saying she was a ‘freak of nature’. The choreographer even said she ‘sings as bad as she looks’. At the opening night of dance show
Latin Fever
in the West End, Revel Horwood said, ‘I think Susan Boyle sucks and I’ll tell you why – she can’t sing and that really bugs me. I saw her singing “Memory” and she absolutely mauled it. If Elaine Paige or Andrew Lloyd Webber had seen that performance, if they were dead, they’d be spinning in their graves. It was awful. It had major pitch problems throughout. I could go on and on. And that panel of judges just sits there and says how wonderful she was. I was beside myself. I was wanting to smash the TV. I’m hoping people with talent will win, not just the freaks of nature who come out with a little bit of a warble and everyone goes, “Wow!”’
Such comments can hardly have helped Susan, but now that the hurdle of that semi-final was over, there was a great deal worse to come in an astonishing week. The first signs that all was not going to be plain sailing came with reports of her keeping guests awake at the Wembley Plaza Hotel where the contestants were staying – at two o’clock in the morning.
She hardly ever stopped practising, and even in the wee small hours her voice could be clearly heard coming from her room. One guest said, ‘She is obviously desperate to win. She just sings all day and all night. It’s been keeping me up – it’s such a cacophony.’ The day after her semi-final triumph she came down into the main area of the hotel and surprised onlookers with her by-now famous shimmy.
She was modest in her assessment of her performance. ‘The pressure was really on me. But you tend to ignore the fact that other people are watching. You just concentrate on what’s happening in the here and now in that particular studio… Anything can happen – but I’m going to do the really best I can. I just want to thank the people of Britain for getting behind me. You’ve made my dreams come true.’
But afterwards, she made a somewhat awkward appearance on ITV2’s
Britain’s Got More Talent
, where she seemed nervous and uncomfortable. Some of her answers to questions barely made sense. At one point she was shown a doll of herself that was for sale. When
asked what she thought of it, she put the doll next to her nose instead of giving an answer.
The debate about what song she should sing in the final – Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘If I Loved You’ and the anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ were mentioned as possible candidates – continued, but there was more controversy to come. First, there was the bizarre report that she had donned a Scunthorpe FC shirt for fans and then urged them to sell it on eBay.
Some days later she was widely reported to have reacted in a bizarre manner when hearing Piers Morgan’s praise of Shaheen Jafargholi – who was subsequently to reach the final on the judges’ votes. Morgan said, ‘I think that, pound for pound, that was the best singing performance we’ve seen so far.’ Shaheen’s rendition of ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going’ prompted Morgan to describe it as ‘breathtaking’.
Susan apparently reacted in fury to Morgan’s praise of the schoolboy and was reported to have stuck two fingers up at a television, shouting ‘f*** off’ in front of 150 surprised guests before stomping off to her room for the rest of the night.
One witness was quoted as saying, ‘Susan was sitting there quite happily with her drink at first. She got a bit annoyed when a busload of tourists asked for autographs and told them to wait until Shaheen had finished. She was smiling as Shaheen sang but afterwards, when Piers started praising him, Susan went nuts.
‘She got up, did one of those strange wiggling dances that she does, and then stuck two fingers up at the TV. Then she marched off. We didn’t see her again.
‘Everyone staying at the hotel gets on really well – it’s like one big happy
BGT
family – so everyone was shocked by her outburst.’
A spokeswoman for the show confirmed that Susan had left the bar before the end of the show but added, ‘As far as we are aware Susan was not at the bar during Shaheen’s performance. She started watching the show there but left early and watched some of the acts in her room because she was being asked for interviews in the bar by journalists.’
There was more to come, and again rumours circulated with different versions of what happened. Under the headline ‘SuBo Goes Loco; Exclusive: Temper Boyles Over… Twice’, the
Sun
reported: ‘She stunned
Britain’s Got Talent
fans, contestants and their families before going into meltdown later in front of hundreds of hotel guests. There were fears last night that the pressure was getting to the show favourite. Cops intervened at 5pm yesterday after Susan, 48, went berserk in the lobby of the Wembley Plaza Hotel in North London when two strangers set out to “wind her up”. The Scottish singer was heard to roar: “How f***ing dare you! You can’t f***ing talk to me like that.”
‘One of two cops stationed at the hotel went up and asked: “Is there a problem?” Susan, dubbed SuBo,
roared: “Of course there’s a f***ing problem.” Tears flowing, she turned on her heel and marched out the exit followed by her family, production staff and the cops.’
The paper went on to quote an onlooker as saying: ‘It took her a long time to calm down from whatever upset her. She was breathing heavily and in a terrible rage. The pressure is obviously getting to Susan. Perhaps all the fame is too much for her.’
A representative of
BGT
offered a different perspective, however, saying that the strangers (later said to be journalists) had been ‘trying to wind her up’. He added, ‘The police were not called. They were already present.’ The entire incident lasted a quarter of an hour. A spokeswoman was quoted as saying, ‘Two journalists were harassing her and pushed her over the edge. She was left slightly distressed and the journalists were removed from the building by police.’
Nevertheless, her behaviour prompted the newspaper to report that some neighbours in Blackburn had been known to refer to her as ‘Rambo’ after the vengeful Sylvester Stallone character in the violent action movies. ‘The reason is because if Susan doesn’t get what she wants, she goes wild.’ Another added, ‘It’s not unusual to see her freak out over the smallest thing. A few of us think it’s only a matter of time before she loses it on the show.’
Something had to be done; the danger signs were there for many to see. Susan Boyle, the biggest ‘star’ ever on
Britain’s Got Talent
, was on the point of quitting the show.
So, two days before the final, Susan was taken from the hotel to a secret hideout in order to escape the intense pressure of the public spotlight she was now in. This was what her success had brought to her life – she’d gone from council house to safe house.
An insider said, ‘Show bosses told us to get Susan’s mind right because there are genuine concerns about her health. She desperately needs breathing space. The idea is to get into a place where her privacy is better managed than at a hotel. She’ll be totally shielded from people other than her closest advisors.’
Writing on his blog, Piers Morgan said, ‘Susan is finding it very, very difficult to cope, and to stay calm. She has been in tears many times during the last few days, and even felt like quitting altogether and fleeing all the attention.’
He added, ‘Susan Boyle is a very kind, generous-hearted lady who has had a pretty tough life. She was deprived of oxygen during her birth, and that left her with “learning difficulties”, causing her to be called “Simple Susan” at school. But she’s always, according to people who knew her well, been a fun-loving woman who would do anything to help others. I’m not saying she’s a saint. But I am saying that before all this fuss, Susan was generally considered to be a genuinely lovely person – albeit, one with a lively, feisty character, and a wonderfully eccentric sense of humour.’
He said that reading bitchy comments about her had
made him feel ‘very, very angry’. ‘She’s had to read stories and columns, and listen to radio and TV phone-ins, calling her arrogant, insincere, spoiled, fake, mad and so on. Now, I have been called all that and worse in my career, but I spent 20 years in Fleet Street and know how to deal with it. Susan Boyle has never experienced anything like this and is like a frightened rabbit in headlights.’