Lost in Showbiz professes itself transfixed by an interview in Hello! magazine with Amanda Holden, in which she discusses what goes on backstage at Britain’s Got Talent: “I can’t even give you a hint of a clue about what Simon Cowell and I get up to. It’s a little game we play, but if it came out it would ruin me. It’s career-destroying – but fantastic fun.”
A “little game” that’s “career-destroying, but fantastic fun”: Lost In Showbiz’s mind has been working overtime since it read those words. Who knows what kind of “little game” it might take to excite Cowell, jaded as his appetites doubtless are after years of wealth and luxury? Russian roulette? Forcing interns to undergo a series of terrifying and depraved “hazing” rituals? Indulging a desire to gamble on ever-more-horrific bloodsports?
It suspects the latter. Oh, it doubtless seemed innocent enough, just a bit of “naughty fun”, when it all began back in the Stavros Flatley era, with straightforward cock-fighting. But these things escalate quickly – the size of the bets, the bloodlust in Holden and Cowell’s eyes – and now it’s mushroomed out of control. They’re into the hard stuff: a revival of the forgotten 18th-century pastime of monkey-baiting, in which a monkey, armed with a foot-long club, was pitted against a bull mastiff. LiS can only pray for the day when Britain learns the truth, perhaps through a slip of the tongue on the judging panel: “Your act is OK, but it’s frankly not as interesting as the monkey I’ve got backstage that can kill a dog with a club. So it’s a ‘no’ from me.”
