A few weeks ago, in Susan Boyle’s home town of Blackburn, West Lothian, I was
one of the many, many journalists who came clodhopping down her quiet wee
street to make her life a misery. I won’t lie, I felt fairly uncomfortable
about it. I’d watched all of her interviews on YouTube and I’d noted the
transition from the smiley, happy lady who chatted with the bloke from the West
Lothian Courier and sat on the Scottish Television sofa to the
shell-shocked, monosyllabic bag of nerves who, weeks later, was doing video
links with Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman. Even so, the word on the
street was that I’d got the wrong end of the stick. Videos aside, everybody
said, she was still a happy lady, loving her new life and looking forward to
the final. To my pronounced and unprofessional relief, I only ever saw her
cat, anyway. Boyle herself was down at the shops.
“Her friends and family may have been very well meaning,” says Dr Pam Spurr, a
behavioural expert, “but they will have had no idea of the things they
should or shouldn’t have been saying to her. They could have been saying
‘You’re going to win, you’re going to win’. It becomes very one-sided. Win
or it’s all lost. And she didn’t.”
Then again, for the past few months perhaps everybody has been a bit lost. Max
Clifford, the publicist, doesn’t represent Susan Boyle but does represent
Simon Cowell, her new Svengali. “This is an unique situation,” he says. “I
have worked with the biggest stars in the world. Nobody has ever become
world famous this instantly before. With Paul Potts (Britain’s Got Talent,
2007) it happened quickly but nothing like as quick as this. Total obscurity
to world fame in seconds. Nobody knows how to handle this because it has
never happened before. We’re all learning. Simon’s learning. None of us saw
it coming.”
Boyle was admitted to the Priory Clinic in North London on Sunday, after an
unspecified incident at the Crowne Plaza hotel, Central London. The police
have confirmed that officers attended to help “doctors assessing a woman
under the Mental Health Act”, and the London Ambulance Service said that its
staff had been there, too. She is not thought to have been sectioned. All
the same, by the end of yesterday it was considered unlikely that she would
be taking part in the Britain’s Got Talent live tour, which
starts on June 12, or that she would undertake a planned trip to the US. Pam
Spurr is not surprised. “If she has had any sort of breakdown,” she says,
“three weeks is not a very long time.”
By mid-afternoon, Talkback Thames (the producers of BGT) had admitted
that contestants were not psychologically profiled before appearing on the
show, and that this was a policy it was now reviewing. Reports were also
suggesting that Ofcom was considering launching an inquiry into Britain’s
Got Talent, after receiving a “large number” of complaints that Boyle
was allowed to perform in the final at all. Speaking to The Times,
Ofcom confirmed the complaints but denied the inquiry.
After visiting Blackburn last month, I spoke to Sara Lee, the publicist from
Talkback Thames, who was handling Boyle’s media. I was surprised, I told
her, that Susan was still in her house in Blackburn. Still nipping down to
the shops, or into the Happy Valley pub for a pint of lemonade on her
regular chair in the corner, for any passing hack to (almost) see. Lee says:
“We’ve been led by what Susan wanted and she wanted to stay at home. If
she’d wanted to go away to a hotel, then she would have done. And she did,
for a couple of days. But she has always wanted to do what she wanted to do.
”
In the run-up to last weekend’s final, tabloids were reporting arguments and
temper tantrums. “That was the first major sign of a problem,” Spurr says.
“And if that was the first major sign that we all saw, then there must have
been minor signs that the production company saw. Something like that
doesn’t just come out of the blue. Either the people looking out for her
were not qualified to determine that this was a serious sign, or they didn’t
have anybody looking out for her. If they did have a system in place, then
it was a massively flawed system. It was obvious that she was vulnerable
from the first performance.”
“This is the modern equivalent of a freak show,” says Mark Borkowski, the
publicist and author of The Fame Formula: How Hollywood’s Fixers, Fakers
and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry. “I’m one of the few
people who didn’t feel that she had much of a future. You can’t pluck
somebody with those issues and fix them overnight. This has been a fantastic
soap opera for the fame-makers, Syco [Simon Cowell’s record label] and
Talkback TV. I’m not suggesting that they are cynical and deliberately
looking to exploit, but they have got their eye on the buck. They’ve done
very well out of Paul Potts and they want to see what they can make out of
this. We are beginning to see more and more people who are casualties of the
process. Jade Goody was over. She was resurrected by her illness.”
Jim Chancellor is the managing director of Fiction Records, and signed Elbow
and Snow Patrol among others. “I’ve a real problem with those talent shows,”
he says. “Her fame is based on the fact that she turned out to be something
other than what she appears to be. It’s abhorrent, this idea of ‘let’s roll
out a bunch of freaks and then gasp as we see how good they are’. People are
being made to feel that it’s acceptable to build someone up and knock them
down in the space of a few weeks. That’s not a part of the industry I want
to work with. It all happened in a few weeks. It must have hit her like a
ton of bricks.”
What next for Susan Boyle? Understandably, nobody will say. The Priory won’t
even confirm whether she is there. “I will say this,” Max Clifford says,
“she’s better today than she was yesterday. She’s somewhere quiet, she’s
being looked after.”
What Boyle needs now, he says, is people from home. “People close to her, whom
she has been close to for many years. People who are happy to be in that
situation. As opposed to being on her own, isolated, surrounded by
television and music executives. These are people who understand the
machinations of the media but they don’t understand her. She comes from a
different planet.”
Clifford says that he can’t see Boyle ever being able to live a quiet life
again. “But I keep reminding people,” he says, “she put herself forward. She
wanted to be on stage. Right up until last week, when the tabloids turned on
her, she was loving the whole process. Simon sees the most important thing
as her being happy and fulfilled, whether she is pursuing a career or not.”
If Boyle does manage to have a career after this, almost everybody agrees that
it will be a lucrative one. Stuart Clarke, A&R editor at Music Week,
agrees. “It may be short-lived but you can’t argue with the huge exposure
she’s had globally,” he says. “She could sell a lot of albums and concert
tickets — if she’s mentally fit she could be a very big earner. Looking at
the examples of artists who have come out of reality shows; the odds are
against a real long-term career. There will be another programme, another
year.”
“When you need to buy time,” Borkowski says, “you shove someone in the Priory.
They want this woman to be fit and are hoping she will come through the
other side. If they get this right, she could make millions. But at what
personal cost?”
Additional reporting Chloe Lambert
Welcome to the human zoo, Susan
In 1810 a black South African woman, Sara Baartman, was put on show in
Piccadilly. The “Hottentot Venus”, as she became known, was an instant
attraction. Crowds paid large sums of money to gawp at her scantily clad body
and at the large buttocks and apparently “distended” genitals characteristic
of her Khoisan tribe. She was an exhibit in a human zoo — the more
adventurous visitors daring to pinch her, or poke her with their walking
canes.
Some liberals of the day objected to what they saw as a cruel and exploitative
display, and they brought Baartman’s case to court. But her managers
produced a contract to show that she was taking a proportion of the profits
and Baartman’s testimony backed this up. The case was thrown out. The
“Hottentot Venus” spent the rest of her short life (she died in 1815) on
public display in Britain and France. You could still gawp at her skeleton
and genitals in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris as late as the 1970s.
The arguments of Baartman’s managers were little different from the arguments
of those in ITV who now seek to justify the display of Susan Boyle. This is
an opportunity for wealth and fame, they say. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime
chance to be plucked from the obscurity of the Eastern Cape or Blackburn.
It’s not voyeurism and it’s not exploitation.
Of course, it is exploitation. And Western society has been enjoying this kind
of voyeuristic pleasure for centuries — while also coming up with equally
weak alibis for doing so.
Two thousand years ago the Romans used to turn up to see dwarfs on show in the
arena, alongside the wretched and the destitute who performed as gladiators
or fought wild beasts. Crowds flocked in their thousands to watch these
murderous games — or occasionally the rather more artistic, but equally
murderous, tableaux (one favourite involved dressing a criminal up as
Hercules and burning him alive on a pyre, as the mythical hero was supposed
to have died).
When it came to the end of a fight, the crowd would get its chance to vote. It
could bay for the blood of the losing man and see him killed.
Or, if it judged the loser a plucky fighter (like Hollie Steel, perhaps), it
could spare him to fight another day. Those in the crowd who booed Boyle on
Saturday were not so different from the rabble of the amphitheatre. Nor, in
a way, were we who took up our phones to vote against her from home.
The Romans sometimes fondly imagined that these gladiators were getting their
chance of glory, too. They could even treat them as glamorous sex symbols,
the pin-ups of the Roman world.
The truth was quite different: gladiators were poor, sad slaves, destined for
an early grave.
For us, the truth is that Susan Boyle is a vulnerable and exploited
middle-aged woman. She is not a star in the making, being given a lucky
break thanks to BGT.
Mary Beard
Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and Classics Editor of
the TLS
