Britain's Got Talent

For all the bum notes that Britain's Got Talent strikes - the sincerity-challenged Piers Morgan, the moist-eyed Amanda Holden, those puerile thirtysomethings, Ant and Dec - its audition rounds remain television's surprise symphony. While Haydn surprised once with that fortissimo chord at the end of his pianissimo section, Britain's Got Talent surprises again and again, tripping up its audience who, taking one look at the obvious loser in the wings, settle down to sneer and are then surprised by talent, or else, conversely, wrongfooting them with expectations levered upwards and then dashed.

The producers work hard at this, raising and lowering expectations with incidental music and significance-bearing audience cutaways. But even without the artifice, these opening episodes of the talent show would work - as surely they do in the regional theatres where they are recorded - because until the music starts and the fat lady sings, no one has any idea not only about how good the act is but what it is.

The fat lady who sang and became a star overnight on Saturday's series-three premiere was Susan Boyle (pictured above), a West Lothian spinster who said that she had never been kissed (“Shame,” she said, without a trace of self-pity.) She was 47 going on 57, had hair like a crow's nest, and wanted to be Elaine Paige. The audience guffawed. But then to increasing incredulity and mounting applause, she sang I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables. She possessed a voice of breathtaking tunefulness and confidence.

Morgan called it the greatest surprise of his three years on the show. Holden called it the greatest wake-up call ever. Simon Cowell, who is a very witty man, said he knew from the moment she walked on the stage... There was some kind of Shrek moral going on here, a corrective to our appearance-besotted age. If Susan Boyle had not existed, the Noughties would have had to invent her to prevent the decade from crashing into its own looking glass.

Elsewhere, the symphony played and there was a surprise in every movement. An overweight Greek restaurateur and his tubby son threatened a version of their plate-spinning act. Instead they stripped to the waist, donned Boris Johnson wigs and did a riotous send-up of Riverdance. A woman came on with an XL glove puppet and proceeded to mime to a record (not really ventriloquism, was it?) A 60-year-old telephone engineer professed himself a Gene Kelly fan, got the stage, and waved his arms without once moving his feet. (“Not dancing,” noted Cowell.) James from Dunfermline had practised for two years to beat the world record for gobbling Ferrero Rocher chocolates in a minute. The record was seven. He managed four. (“I ate five,” said Ant, who had been munch-matching him in the wings. “That's good,” conceded James.)

And then came Fabia, a disco dancing champion in her teenage years who had gained weight impressively, and professed a wish to recapture the triumphs of her youth. The woman only went on to do a striptease, her modesty preserved for viewers by the superimposition over her chest of two unevenly balanced Union flags. I was reminded of the remarks that would precede episodes of the Sixties puppet classic Stingray (shown on Sci-Fi's Supermarionation weekend: five stars, obviously): “Anything can happen in the next half hour.” The only fault with Saturday's BGT is that it went on for 90 minutes.

Doctor Who

Saturday's Doctor Who, which is rationing itself to four specials this year, David Tennant and Russell T. Davies's last, also seemed a bit long at an hour. Called Planet of the Dead, presumably in homage to the original 1963 Skaro adventure The Dead Planet (although there were no Daleks), it paid back critics who said you could drive a double-decker bus through its plot holes by driving a double-decker bus through its own wormhole.

It began strongly with a well-staged jewellery theft by Michelle “Bionic” Ryan and ended well, too, with a swarm of metallic stingrays (another tribute?) doing something to the space-time continuum. Along the way, however, Davies fell victim to his old tropes: sexualising the doctor by having him kiss yet another female companion, fetishising him by having Lee Evans as an eccentric boffin kneel at his feet and declare he loved him, and granting him another soliloquy about his cosmic solitariness.

Skellig

Swarms of crows and clouds of house dust acted as visual metaphors in Sky's major Easter Day offering Skellig, a feature-length adaptation of David Almond's teenage novel about a tramp with wings in a potting shed. The wings reminded me a bit of Red Riding, Skellig's levitation and healing powers of John from Cincinnati. John Simm played the dad, Kelly MacDonald the mum and Tim Roth the tramp/angel, all very well. It was another don't-judge-by-appearances fable and easily the most upmarket thing Sky 1 has ever done. Unfortunately, it was also extremely dull. Only if it had been shot in Eastern Europe and shown with subtitles would you have mistaken it for a masterpiece.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010