Why watching Britain’s Got Talent is like giving yourself a lobotomy

The kids are back for half-term so we’re having to watch absolute crap again on TV. Monday night, I wanted to watch The Fall (BBC1). But I couldn’t, obviously, because Britain’s Got Talent (ITV1) was on.

‘Dad! Dad! You’ve got to see this!’ So I come in to see what I’ve got to see and it’s a man called Aaron Crow whose unique and remarkable skills are that he never speaks, he has an interesting haircut, and he does mildly scary magic tricks which aren’t quite as good as Dynamo’s. Also he pronounces his name ‘Aran’ — as in sweater. Is this some other annoying new trend I didn’t know about? Kids being unable to pronounce ‘Aaron’ in the same way they think the word ‘worry’ rhymes with ‘lorry’?

Problem is, it’s amazing how quickly you get sucked in, like performing an instant auto-lobotomy. There I am with Girl, lingering on the sofa to see what novelty act comes on next. It’s a couple of scruffy blokes who by day work behind the counter of a tearoom in Wales, but by night are a duetting pair of swoonsome operatic tenors. Their biggest fan is their Nan, who has come wearing a T-shirt urging viewers to vote for them. Apparently when they were kids, she’d play all this opera on the record player and soon enough the boys were singing along like proper professionals.

This is why the show is so popular: it’s not the acts themselves, which you can often take or leave, but the back stories. You’re drawn into this fantastical parallel universe where, far from being a septic isle of dole-scroungers, Islamist plotters, doggers and increasingly desperate solar-panel salesman, Britain is a magical realm of undiscovered talent, brimful of charming, homely, modest, simple folk who will yet one day achieve untold fortune thanks to the brilliance of their ‘Nessun Dorma’/delightful performing dog/conjuring tricks.