Last May, 15-year-old George Sampson became TV’s own Billy Elliot, when his quirky, body-popping street-dance routine won ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent, thrusting him into the public eye and the gaze of an army of little girl fans. It heralded an instant transformation in George’s life, and launched a remarkable year for the boy from Lancashire.

Straight after the tearful reprise of his winning rain-drenched Singin’ in the Rain routine on finals night a year ago, he was whisked into a nationwide Britain’s Got Talent tour, then immediately into the West End for a month, starring in the break-dance musical Into the Hoods. In November he began work on an online television show, the brainchild of the social-networking site Bebo and Simon Cowell, George’s new patron, who had signed him to his record label. A single followed, and then a hugely popular dance DVD in December.

“I can’t even remember all the things I’ve done in the last year,” George says. He doesn’t have to: his every step has been meticulously recorded by the press, along with exhaustive blogging from a growing multitude of teenage fans. But two highlights recur in his conversation — the Britain’s Got Talent tour gave him his first experience of dancing in front of a huge paying audience; and Into the Hoods placed him alongside other trained professional dancers, many his own age.

The physical intensity of being in the musical made particular demands on George, who suffers from Scheuermann’s disease, a rare teenage bone condition. Little is understood about it, treatment is limited, and it can have alarming symptoms: early last year George went blind in one eye for two months and lost much of his physical co-ordination. Though he admits he was worried about it then, he seems remarkably unfazed now. “No one really understands it, and it could flare up again tomorrow — but it’s not going to stop me dancing.”

George faced other emotional hurdles last year, too. His father, from whom his mother separated six years ago, tried to re-establish contact with him after the final, and repeatedly expressed his desire to be reunited. George is unconvinced, preferring the unit he’s built with his mother, with whom he moved to London last summer. “He had never tried before then. Even when he was living with us I didn’t feel he was around much. I feel much more independent without him.”

Though George says there’s little about this last year he would change, the recent reactions of his male peers at home in Warrington are increasingly distressing to him. When he last went back, to judge a dance contest at an under-18s nightclub, he was booed — and not for the first time. “They don’t like the fact that I’ve moved to London. They think I’ve disowned them. Now it happens every time I go back — all the lads will boo me.”

If he is frustrated with the sexual jealousy underpinning the boys’ resentment, he’s just as disappointed by his home town’s lack of pride in his achievements. “They did this survey of the people Warrington’s most proud of, and I came nowhere. Even Kerry Katona came above me.”

The response of Warrington’s male teenagers is not shared by their female counterparts. But George’s teen-sex-symbol status has in fact limited his relationships with girls. “You’d think with all the thousands of girls it would be easier to find a girlfriend, but it’s so much harder.” It wouldn’t be easy for the girl either, he points out: when he gave a fan his hat after a show, she was almost beaten up. His mum has advised him: “Never go out with a fan.” And George agrees. But how else is he going to meet someone? He has not had a girlfriend since he won. This summer he wants to take his friends away on holiday, so he can meet girls who don’t know who he is: “Sweden, maybe, or Turkey.”

As for the future, he is under no illusions about the fickleness of the industry. Despite his passion for singing, which he works on with a producer every week, the single he released in November floundered; and with the prospect of a new Britain’s Got Talent winner about to grab the spotlight, he appreciates he could become yesterday’s news. So he’s keeping up the hard work, including studying for his GCSEs, inevitably neglected in the past year, which will also help him to “stay out of trouble” and avoid any adverse coverage that might threaten his hard-working, “honest lad” image.

As yet his appeal shows little sign of waning. He has just returned from the States, where he appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show — an achievement of which few other UK talent-show winners can boast — and he was very well received.

“The audience went as crazy as they did when I won the final a year ago,” he says. You get a sense that the easy-going confidence of the one-time street busker from Lancashire could be justified.

Interview by Hugo Cox.

Portrait by Jon Tonks

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