Current mood:	impressed
Entry tags:	eccentrics, music

Britain's Got Talent -- It made me cry
They talked about this on KGSR this morning, and someone posted about her on Herdomain too, so I found the YouTube clip of frumpy, spunky, 47-year-old Susan Boyle killing with a Les Miz song in a recent Britain's Got Talent (their version of American Idol). She's an overnight sensation, millions of YouTube hits, etc. Now the comments all seem to be how watching the clip makes everybody cry. I did. It's kinda amazing and a good human lesson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.

Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used
And wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung
No wine untasted.

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame.

And still
I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms
We cannot weather...

I had a dream my life would be
So different form this hell I'm living
so different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

Update: Conversations about this woman and her unlikely success... That she challenged the youthful contestants on this show, for one. That she took the snickers and eye-rolls and made people reverse their opinions. A good comment was that the event was manipulated; the goofy music, the quick clips of her admitting cheerily to classic spinster details, the patronizing "How old are you Susan" from Simon in a tone more appropriate to a five-year-old. But even knowing and seeing that (it's one of the most manipulative of the reality shows, both in the US and England), you still get a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes from her voice and her phrasing. She's also not untutored; there's a clip on YouTube of Susan Boyle's song in a charity performance from 10 years ago, and she's great on that too: Cry Me a River.

But the discussions brought up for me why I don't like American Idol or America's Got Talent or those other shows. That part of the show where deluded contestants stand there, full of arrogance, and perform crappy auditions*, that's just mean. It's people laughing at the weakest parts of human nature as demonstrated by real humans, versus laughing at highly paid actors mouthing scripts by highly paid writers.

Those actors get to put off the deluded characters at the end of the day, but the foolish souls mocked on the reality shows go home with L-O-S-E-R tattooed across their foreheads. It makes me mad that there are such high TV audiences for that. It makes me furious that Simon Caldwell is making tens of millions of $$ from it.


*I find I can have some interest in watching the finalists perform in challenges; they're all acknowledged as good singers by that point, and loserdom is not part of the theme.