For once some one writes the truth...
It Was Us, Susan Boyle, Who Drove You Mad
Quentin Letts, 06.02.09, 01:09 PM EDT
We are guilty for the dowdy Scot's rapid rise to--and fall from--fame.
Susan Boyle
Television, most voracious of mediums, just chewed and spat out another innocent. Susan Boyle, the 48-year-old Scottish singer and talent show contestant, has been taken to a clinic after a psychiatric breakdown.
Poor Susan. The whole world, it seems, has been watching her, cheering her--and laughing at her. It laughed because she was not pretty in the conventional sense. It laughed because she was plainly a bit peculiar. And it laughed because the turbo-charged beauty of her voice contrasted sharply with her dowdy looks.
London's newspapers nicknamed her "the hairy angel" almost as soon as she burst into the news cycle in April. Paparazzi, film crews and Fleet Street Macintoshes chased her down the street and made her life an exhausting misery.
She was given a fashion makeover. She was followed into bars and hotels and had her remarks eavesdropped on at all hours. She was hot copy. Hardly anyone stopped to worry about her learning difficulties.
Now that the Britain's Got Talent show has pocketed its money and come to the end of its current run, however, the woman who helped make it such a success is under sedation in a secure environment. The showbiz jackals have picked her carcass clean.
Effectively, a defenseless, middle-aged virgin was placed in fame's microwave and went "Pop!" The virgin thing is a major fact in the matter. It was her lack of worldliness--she admitted she had never been kissed romantically--that made her so interesting to the media in the first place.
Imagine: In this era of sexual incontinence, a Western woman who had almost reached her 50th birthday without being snogged. News announcers, disclosing this nugget, gave small head gestures that meant, "Unbelievable, ain't it?" Boyle was soon left in no doubt that she was a freak.
When she first appeared on the talent show, the three judges on the program radiated mockery and ennui. Boyle looked like an off-duty nun. She was plump, hirsute, about as sexy as a wet weekend in her home county of West Lothian.
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Simon Cowell, who is not only a judge but also one of the money men behind Britain's Got Talent, shot her a look that said, "Get that ridiculous old bag out of here." Members of the audience shielded their eyes, unable to look at such a strange sausage.
But then she opened her mouth and started singing. It was the first time she had performed since her old mother's death, and certainly the first time she had sung to such a big crowd. The judges' jaws dropped. The audience started whooping. It was marvelous--a moment the beauty of music trumped all the customary plastic surgery and lip gloss and plastic hairdos of spangled showbiz.
The video clip was stuck on the Internet, and the world caught fire, as it can so quickly these days. Boyle, a woman who previously had been employed only as a trainee cook, went from maiden-aunt crooner to global sensation faster than you could set a bowl of milk jelly.
In fame's early hours, she was fantastically excited and lapped up the attention.
"Su-Bo," as the tabloids are now calling her, was clearly set to become the subject of a biopic motion picture. Until Saturday's night's Britain's Got Talent final, which she was expected to win easily, that movie would have been a classic ugly-duckling-turns-into-swan yarn, a tale of how the church volunteer from a modest family in Scotland won a competition watched by 19 million people--roughly a third of Britain's population.
That was going to be the storyline, anyway. But Boyle did not win the show. To nearly everyone's great surprise, perhaps not least her own, she came in second. The phone-in vote was won instead by a youth dance troupe.
Boyle had already been acting oddly. In the day before the live show, she had shouted at people and was overheard swearing--she the church volunteer!--at a television set. She was not sleeping much. Nor did she eat well. She was living away from her family at a smart London hotel. (In her old life, she had rarely patronized hotels.) Every day, fresh stories about her strange behavior surfaced. The fashion makeover, done to please her new media friends, backfired. Columnists started saying she was even uglier now that she was trying to look fashionable.
On the day after the final episode, an ambulance was called to her hotel and she was gently led away to the Priory, one of London's better-known clinics for the unsteady. Reportedly, she felt she had "let everyone down" by not winning. She worried that she would never now be given the chance to sing professionally--the one thing that interested her all along.
And so the biopic has experienced a plot twist. It will make it a better story in some ways, though not for the unhappy, confused Boyle.
Cowell and his TV production company Sy-Co (pronounced, oh dear, "psycho") have been accused of failing to look after Boyle, and relevant wording of the terrestrial TV license conditions governing broadcasters is being discussed.
Personally, I'd say the TV program makers are not entirely to blame. I would even make the case that these talent shows, although vulgar, are a worthwhile device, reintroducing ideas of competitiveness and failure to a Britain whose state schools have sought to extinguish all concept of selection based on merit.
Cowell and Co. are far from saintly. They have undoubtedly made millions off of Boyle's weirdness. But that is something freak shows in Victorian times used to do.
The guilty party is, surely, all of us--all the members of a society that fell on an un-photogenic virgin as though she were the last tribal bush woman in the Amazon. Boyle would not have been so amazing to us, and therefore would not have been such a big story, if she had been even moderately good-looking or had serial boyfriends. No, it was our own obsession with plastic looks and sex above all else that made her seem unusual. She was just a simple soul from small-town Scotland. Why should she share our sophisticated, decadent view?
Let's hope Boyle recovers her health swiftly and then returns to her family in West Lothian. Her neighbors up there are proud of her for coming second and intend to give her a belter of a welcome when she finally comes home. They may never have kissed her, but at least they loved her for the right reasons.
