Dreams don’t come true

If had a teenage daughter (and sadly I am old enough to have one), and she took after me and was tall and..ahem..strapping, but had a pretty face (unlike me!) and after people telling her how attractive she was, decided she wanted to enter Miss England, as much as she would hate me for it, I would do all I could to stop her from doing it. Why? Well I know what a cruel world it is out there and even though my daughter might be stunningly pretty and maybe no more than a size 16, which the average UK dress size. She would be entering a world where anything over a size 10 is considered as fat and rather than risk my (imaginary) child at best being laughed at and at worst ending up on a mortuary slab after starving herself to death to keep up with her skinny peers, I’d rather she hated me for a few months.

But that would be acceptable. We live in a world where it’s still OK to call people fat, to laugh at their shortcomings and stop them doing things because they don’t look quite right.

I’m going to be shot down about this, and have the PC police on my back but I have to get this off my chest. Just like my imaginary chubby daughter with the pretty face but the wrong figure to be a beauty queen; Susan Boyle never was going to be able to cope with the fame that was thrown at her. Cards on the table - the woman has learning difficulties. Just because she doesn’t come across as a drooling simpleton or someone with a sweet, childlike demeanour like Benny from Crossroads, it is a fact that she has been crippled by her limitations all of her life and now it transpires that - like a child - her frustrations manifest themselves in terrible rages. When I wrote my previous blog, praising us all for giving her the chance to shine, I, like everyone else just thought she was a simple soul who’d never been given a break.

The moment she started raging and throwing her weight about, all those people back home in Blackburn started saying they knew she had rages like it and had even nicknamed her ‘Ramboyle’. Her brother whinged to the papers that she had been treated badly by the producers of Britain’s Got Talent and it’s their fault she cracked up. No, it’s all those people around her who have encouraged her to pursue her dream of singing who are at fault. Yes she has a lovely voice, but it’s not that exceptional that it would have been some terrible disaster if we’d never got to hear it. What is more important is this poor woman’s mental health. Her overtly but somehow innocent sexual displays are like a young teenager whose hormones are raging but their body doesn’t know how to cope with them; her tantrums when Piers Morgan praised Shaheen Jafagholi is like a child who wants to be their parent’s special little soldier. She may be 48 years old but mentally she is much younger and those around her should have put the brakes on her showbiz aspirations years ago. OK they live in a small village, but do they not have TV, books, magazines, internet? Day in Day out we’re exposed to the ravages of fame, how people are built up and then knocked down. They should have known this would have happened to Susan and drawn a line under this farce a long time ago.

Equal opportunities are fine but just like companies who use positive discrimination to recruit people to fill quotas are wrong and impractical because it should be about the right person for the job rather than who they represent, so should the same go with things like talent contests and reality TV. Susan Boyle is no Jade Goody – a simpleton academically but with a business brain as sharp as a barrow boy. Susan has genuine problems that will always hold her back.

I watched a programme about Tourette’s syndrome the other day. It was contrasting two young men with the condition. The first one, John is the same age as me, the other was a young lad of 15, and just the twenty years between them had made all the difference. John had grown up in a world where Tourettes was treated like a major embarrassment, his own mother even told him to pull himself together and ended up moving across the border to England. Greg, the younger lad is surrounded by a loving family and friends who think his condition is cool. Well, Susan Boyle is another ten years older than John and no doubt when she was growing up, someone with her condition would not have been given any encouragement to develop and integrate with society so her frustration would turn to anger and violent rages. This behaviour is now ingrained in her and it will be how she always reacts when she doesn’t get her own way.

Maybe she will be better off in the US. Americans don’t seem to have the same culture as us where people are built up then knocked down. Maybe her tantrums will just be seen as diva strops and she’ll have a team of psychiatrists to take care of her. Whatever happens, I can’t see this fairy tale ending with a happily ever after.

On a lighter note, I’ve just finished my six hour State of Play marathon. I chose to avoid the Russell Crowe remake as to me Cal McCaffrey will always be John Simm. This is a fantastic thriller and in parts reminds me of The Wire, where the police, press and politics all intertwine. What is also fun to watch is Philip Glenister playing a DCI. He may speak with his London accent and the mannerisms are more controlled, but if you watch closely enough you can still touches of Gene Hunt coming through.

I might watch the film of SoP when it comes out on DVD but I doubt if it will be able to compete. How can that anodyne Ken doll that is Ben Affleck compete with the gorgeous gorgeous David Morrissey? Can Helen Mirren live up to Bill Nighy? No!

Now I’ve got to get thinking about writing my own thriller…I have ideas!

Ciao for now