hold on to your cheerios for a sec.

So I finally watched the Susan Boyle clip.

Background, for those of you under whose rocks the news has not yet managed to creep: Britain's Got Talent is a reality-TV talent show in which aspirants who have sufficiently impressed some unseen producers (positively or negatively, one imagines) perform for a three-judge panel, including the famously acid-snarked Simon Cowell (not, not, not to be confused with Simon Callow, although I may be the only one who mixes these names up) and two other presumably famous people, and a full theatre full of live audience. The audience are invited to be vocal during the performance; the judges have honest-to-god buzzers in front of them which, if all three judges ring in, ends the performance whether you're through or not. (It's the buzzers that get me, not the ending, really; if it were an audition, someone would say "Thank you!" and that would be that. But they wouldn't gong you off the stage.) Once your performance is ended -- whether you've been buzzed or whether you've been allowed to finish -- the judges talk about whether they thought you were any good or not, and make a public decision about whether you'll advance to the next round of competition.

It sounds absolutely excruciating, and I mean this as a viewer, but that's not the point.

The Susan Boyle clip is a seven-minute snippet of this show that's been making the rounds for a couple of days. Susan Boyle is a contestant who absolutely embodies that very useful expression, "Oh, bless her heart." She's a 47-year-old grey-haired roundish cat lady from Nowhere-in-Particular, Scotland, with a healthy British kind of back-chatting attitude but not much sense (it seemed to me) of humor. Or shame, I guess, might be what I mean, not that she should have been ashamed, but you know the kind of thing where people don't really notice that they're being teased (and then mocked, and then scorned)? If they notice but don't care, that's one thing, and they may even make like they're in on the joke; but she doesn't quite get there, does she. I read somewhere that in fact she's got (slight) learning disabilities -- no idea if this is the case, but in any event she's got what we're meant to think is an inappropriate level of self-confidence.

Certainly the way the clip is edited, you're meant to dread her performance, whether you're on the judges' side or on hers: in the former case, because you'll be subjected to this awful performance (though at least you won't have to be polite about it); in the latter, because you think she's going to go down in flames and you're going to have to witness it and you're going to be so embarrassed for her that you'll just want to die.

So out she goes onto the stage, and Simon and the rest tease her, and she doesn't get it, and she says she'd like to be as successful as Elaine Paige, and the camera cuts to a couple of girls in the audience making faces (we're meant to think the girls are saying "shya, as if", but I confess it occurred to me they might be thinking, "as successful as who?"), and she says she's going to sing "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Misérables, which she cannot really pronounce, and you brace yourself.

And she opens her mouth and sings, and Simon's eyebrows rise, and the other two judges are gobsmacked, and the audience is on their feet and cheering (instead of shutting the fuck up and letting her sing, but see above re: excruciating), because she's really quite good. And she knocks their socks off, and doesn't get buzzed, and she gets three Yes votes to advance, and she's beside herself, and isn't it a lovely Cinderella story, and the blogosphere goes berserk.

Which is really the reason I bring it up at all. I've seen a lot of people talking about this over the past 48 hours, and links to bloggery elsewhere, and it's come up on Facebook, and my own father sent me the link and a column about it from (bless his heart) the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and while I've been writing this my office-mate and a friend of hers were watching it on the other side of the room. It's everywhere, and the general (though not universal) consensus seems to be made up of one or more of the following points:

1. Simon and his colleagues never knew what hit them (best turn of phrase on this, actually, from fillyjonk over at Shapely Prose: "They’re all so overwhelmed they don’t even taste the crow.")
   
2. Susan has a great voice, a marvelous voice, the sort of voice people pay hundreds of dollars to see in famous concert halls and rave about for weeks afterward (I've also seen this particular rendition described as better than various Fantines, including the woman some commenter saw in Boston or some such place last week, but also including Broadway's Randy Graff and London's [heh, and the world's] Patti LuPone)
   
3. How's that for inspirational.

And this is the part where my opinions get unpopular.

Item 1. Well, I suppose it's possible, maybe even likely, that Simon et al. assumed ol' Susan must have got through the producers for some sort of comic reason -- Can you believe this bird, thinks she's the next Elaine Paige, let's put her on the telly and mock the shit out of her -- but it's also possible that they assumed she must have been all right to get through the producers, but were sufficiently taken aback by her self-presentation (appearance and demeanor) that they were unprepared for how good she was. Yes, most of what people are quibbling with is this taken-aback-ness by her self-presentation; but I really don't think they were sitting there thinking a middle-aged frump couldn't possibly have a voice on her -- I think they were distracted by the frumpiness and then surprised by her voice.

Also, though, these are professional judgers of talent, and TV stars for it. The first thing means that they've heard plenty, plenty of really impressive performances (about which see item 2), and the second thing means that it is their job to turn their reactions up to eleven. Yes, maybe Piers was ashamed of himself for doubting that Susan could sing. Do I really believe that he's going to go out after the show and buy a sword to fall on? No. And so on. The first or second time the camera finds Simon after Susan begins, damn if Simon doesn't flick his gaze right over to it -- just for a second, but it's so clear to me, it's Right, it's my close-up, better do my Rapture face. I don't think the judges' reactions themselves were insincere; I do have my suspicions about the degrees of those reactions.

Item 2. Okay, she was good. I'll even go as far as very good. Particularly given the nerves (which, given her self-confidence discussed above, she may not actually have felt as much as all that), the fact that her voice was steady and damn near note-perfect was pretty impressive. And it's a tough number, covering close to two octaves and a biggish emotional range.

Here's the thing: she was, as I said, damn near note-perfect, and her voice was very steady and rich. But it didn't sound to me like she had the lowest notes -- hard to say because of the yelling and carrying-on in the audience, and incidentally, it's hard for me to tell if they're really impressed by the performance of itself or if they're impressed by the performance from her, right?, the way I've always said Gwyneth Paltrow won the Oscar for Biggest Difference Between the Performance We Were Expecting and the Performance We Got by an Actress in a Lead Role, which is a category the Academy doesn't actually officially recognize; do they think she's doing well (would they even know? [/snobbery, sorry]), or are they cheering because she's done it at all?, not forgetting that this is a people who sent Eddie Edwards to the Olympics as a ski-jumper.

Anyway, moving on. It didn't sound to me like she had the lowest notes, and she was a little ahead of the beat, and -- and this is the biggest issue for me -- she didn't really range the emotions at all. The number tells a story, and she didn't do that; she sang all the words (actually she sang "lives" instead of "years" at one point, but that's a kid who grew up with Les Miz talking, and not itself a deal-breaker), but you couldn't convince me she felt it. She didn't sell it, except the way the guy on the TV sells Oxi-Clean. I give it a B+, with a little extra credit for situational irony.

Item 3. I don't find the episode especially inspirational, frankly. Even without items 1 and 2, I'm thinking, great, so she'll go through to the next level of competition, fine. She won't have the surprise factor going for her any more, because she's a bona fide Internet Sensation, so she'll have to really, really nail whatever she sings at the next round. I'm sure she can do this, especially with a little coaching, and I assume she'll get that as well as some attention to her hair and wardrobe (which is actually a shame, that she'll have to change things about herself to succeed -- now that she has already succeeded! -- but again, the surprise factor is gone anyway). But it's the Internet Sensation that actually makes me the saddest. Doesn't anyone else see a future in which Susan Boyle becomes a one-trick pony, forever singing "I Dreamed a Dream" for a slack-jawed Simon Cowell who knows the camera loves him? Bless her heart.