TV review: Paul Potts has got talent

Only a grade-A churl could fail to be tickled pink by the footage of Paul Potts appearing for the first time on Britain's Got Talent - now a YouTube staple, and source of inspiration for tubby guys the world over.

The rest of this journey, from heavily in-debt cellphone salesman to international opera star, was the subject of the highly enjoyable Paul Potts - By Royal Command (Prime, Sunday). What's not to like?

An unassuming battler, chronically under-confident about his singing talent, puts himself on to a TV talent show on the toss of a coin, and steals not only the show, but everyone's hearts.

The Paul Potts story has the exact tone of those wonderful old Hollywood movies about singing stars. Rags to riches, nice guys finish first, the meek will inherit the fat recording contract – you name the heart-melting ingredient, it's there.

It pays to bear in mind, however, that this "documentary" was in reality a product - a product from the same brand range as the original TV show, Britain's Got Talent, another project by music enterepreneur Simon Cowell.

It was a further sales pitch for Potts - as though he needs it - rather than a strictly fact- oriented portrait of the likeable star. It followed Potts from his show-stopping debut on the talent show to his meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and finally to his appearance in a Royal Variety show.

Save the now exhaustively well-covered talent show triumph, none of the material was all that interesting. Actually, the honour was Mr Brown's rather than Potts', given the state of the British Government in the polls, and Royal Variety shows are only notches above the Eurovision Song Contest in naffness.

This "journey" was really just an excuse for Cowell to package Potts into another TV appearance. Nothing wrong with that - but it was a wasted opportunity to tell the whole Potts story more thoroughly. Because it's more interesting than just "he won a talent show".

Potts didn't, as this programme would have us believe, land newly minted with an ability to hit the high glories of tenor- land, fresh from his lowly job as a cellphone salesman.

He had in fact starred in four opera productions - admittedly all somewhat far south of La Scala or Covent Garden - and had studied singing in Italy, by the time he went on Britain's Got Talent.

Potts had won a runner-up prize in a Michael Barrymore talent quest, and used the money for professional lessons, during the course of which he was selected to sing in front of Pavarotti and other luminaries.

None of this even faintly diminishes his triumph in winning the TV talent show. You only had to look at the rapt faces of the audience to see the magic at work.

But the fact that Potts had been semi-professional did crush a few tutus during the making of Britain's Got Talent, and this programme hastened past that particular debate.

It did, to its credit, offer us a music critic exasperated with Potts' fame, who argued with great conviction that he wasn't a tenor's backside, and said the public had been sold a pup.

In Potts' defence, Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden - a TV actress - said Potts had "brought opera to the masses".

This was a fascinating argument worthy of further development. The classical music firmament would not rate Potts as more than a drawing room hobbyist, and he would probably never have risen above the parochial productions he had experienced thus far.

Yet the serendipity of reality TV has landed him a far more influential role in broadening the public's musical palette than most of those superior singers put together. People who listen to Pavarotti are also listening to Potts. Can they tell the difference? Does it matter?

Like the similar debate over the concert pianist David Helfgott, who got a serious career going only after showbiz cottoned on to the movie appeal of his schizo-affective mental disorder, this one probably has no right conclusion.

Potts and Helfgott are so darned loveable that their personas become part of the reason people enjoy their music.

 Highbrows telling us they're second-rate only reinforces their status as underdogs made good. What they do is so much better than what most of us can do, the difference between their work and that of the truly great seems apparent only to connoisseurs, which most of us aren't.

Though this fan-show would hardly have presented him otherwise, Potts emerged from the hour an unaffected, humble, still rather insecure man, who has not gone mad through wealth and fame. He is still married to the same woman, Julie-Ann, with whom he had till very recently been on the bones of his behind.

And though he appears to have had his teeth nicened a bit, neither he nor Julie-Ann have rushed out and had lipo- suction, or tiled a swimming pool with gold leaf self-portraits in the usual British nouveau riche way of football and pop stars. He really does appear to be in it for the singing.

Beyond the Disney sweetness of the Potts story, though, the programme's opening scenes from the pre-Potts stages of Britain's Got Talent might have made a whole hour's documentary in themselves.

Before Potts and three or four other respectable acts showed up, the programme looked like being an absolute stinker.

Cowell was in despair as act after act of unbelievable banality rolled up. A man who pinched umpteen clothes pegs to his neck. An act involving a pig. A pensioner who whistled tunelessly while his wife wafted about him with a silk scarf. A unicyclist who set his wheel on fire, then fell off.

Drag acts which deserved the title in other than the usual sense. It was so desultory as to be utterly spell-binding.

As one of the presenters says to- camera during the early filming. "Well, turns out Britain Hasn't Got Talent. Goodbye."

Shockingly, as it now seems, Cowell was seriously considering packing up the show, as it seemed it would never be good enough to go to air.

But perhaps in order to get highlights like Paul Potts, the lowlights have to be very low indeed.

- © Fairfax NZ News