It takes quite a lot to drive the key Britain’s Got Talent audience to anger. Fair-weather viewers – myself included – tend to dip in and out of the show, leaving it in floods of distressed tears whenever the onslaught of noise and colour and identical street-dance troupes becomes too upsetting to bear. But the key audience, the audience that has made Britain’s Got Talent a television mainstay since 2007, are a much hardier bunch.
Until now, that is, because Saturday’s episode appears to have pushed them over the edge. The offending act came in the form of Princess the Hypnodog: a dog that can hypnotise people. The source of concern wasn’t so much the quality of the act – moments before, we had been treated to the sight of a middle-aged man dressed as a nun, driving a piano around in circles and pulling a funny face – or the validity of Princess’s hypnotism credentials.
No, what caused all the fuss were the moments immediately after Princess left the stage, when Simon Cowell temporarily appeared to become hypnotised by the dog’s chocolatey eyes and shiny fur. Now, the BGT audience can put up with a lot of crap, but a momentary narrative diversion created by some flashy editing? That is the last straw. Britain’s Got Talent, the audience said, had jumped the shark.
Well, that’s not exactly what they said. As shown by an archive of tweets compiled by the Mirror, they actually said: “#BritainsGotTalent stooping to a new low …”, “its a fucking insult to tv viewers” and “#bgt taking us for fools not even clever fun”. But, either way, the message was clear. Viewers of Britain’s Got Talent have built up a bond of trust with the show’s producers. Sure, they know these programmes are edited, but they still expect to watch something that more or less reflects reality. By showing Simon Cowell appearing to fall into a trance – worse still, a trance that made him nice to people – that trust had been betrayed.
It is a compelling argument, but one I’m prone to disagree with. Far from being the moment that Britain’s Got Talent fell into an irreparable death-spiral, I actually see Princess the Hypnodog as a sign of a bold revitalisation for the show.
Until this wet-nosed saviour appeared on screen, BGT had all the signs of a show with finite appeal. You can only watch choirs and dance troupes so many times. You can only watch Amanda Holden unhinge her jaw in mock amazement so many times. You can only watch Ant & Dec stand by the side of the stage repeating everything that is happening to the camera, as you would to a confused elderly relative, so many times.
The series needed something to liven it up, and this total schism from the fabric of reality seems like the best way to go. I’m all for it. I want to see next week’s show also edited to make it seem as if Simon Cowell has been hypnotised. Then, the following week, I’d like all his criticism to be edited out and replaced by a series of grunts and coughs. I want everything David Walliams says to be dubbed by a giggling little girl. I want a show where the only things you ever hear are the ambient thoughts that pass through Alesha Dixon’s mind.
I want this bold post-production experimentation to continue, until Britain’s Got Talent ends up looking like that Tim and Eric pizza roll advert or the mushroom scene from A Field in England. Then, and only then, will its survival be guaranteed.
