[Red Moon]

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'Simon thinks he's the Pope!'

ON arriving at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, it immediately becomes obvious the crowds are here for something other than a Shakespeare play.

There’s a buzz of excitement, a strange mixture of children and grannies, and some very odd outfits including a Teddy Boy, a pair of busty wartime singers and a little boy in a suit and bowler hat.

Welcome to the Britain’s Got Talent auditions — the hit show that proves beyond doubt our country is the most eccentric on earth.

The Sun was invited to take an exclusive peek behind the scenes and join the audience as the “fourth judge” alongside Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden.

And we’re an excitable bunch, whooping and jeering before warm-up man Roycey has even had a chance to tell us when to be noisy and when to be quiet.

We’ve seen the show and know this is our chance to shine.

Heckling, though, is banned — partly because the mics cannot pick up individual opinions and partly, you feel, because the producers love the mob mentality.

The noise reaches fever pitch when the judges walk through the audience to take their places on stage.

Piers gets booed, at which he simply shrugs. This is clearly a man who has been booed many, many times before. Amanda gets cheers, one suspects partly for her skintight skirt, silk shirt and designer heels with fetishistic ribbons around the ankles. But when Cowell arrives, it is as if royalty has landed.

It takes him three times as long to get through the crowd, though as Piers mutters later: “They think he’s the Pope. HE thinks he’s the Pope.

“He shakes everyone’s hand, even those who don’t want to shake it.”

There’s a pep talk about how we must take our role as fourth judge seriously, Ant and Dec pop on stage to say hello (their job is to get backstage reaction from acts as they come off), then we start.

First up, a dance troupe make the mistake of announcing they’re from Liverpool. They are jeered by the Manchester audience before they even start their routine.

It seems that comparisons of the auditions to a Victorian freak show or bear-baiting pit are not so exaggerated after all.

Other disasters follow. Mr Gums, dressed in curly wig and silly glasses, is given just a millisecond before Simon buzzes him off and we shout: “Off, off, off.”

Mr Gums protests: “Britain needs me.” Piers wryly notes that what Mr Gums needs is a mental asylum.

Next up is Joe, 54, with a delightful self-penned ditty which goes, “Call me a bounder, call me a rogue, I’m in love with Kylie Minogue”, and “What a lot of totty, I’ve never seen a better botty”. Cowell calls it “slightly pervy”.

But then Joe launches into another song — a touching story about the Falklands, and even Cowell is surprised. He is duly put straight through to the next round. It seems that comparisons of the auditions to a Victorian freak show or bear-baiting pit are not so exaggerated after all.

Other disasters follow. Mr Gums, dressed in curly wig and silly glasses, is given just a millisecond before Simon buzzes him off and we shout: “Off, off, off.”

Mr Gums protests: “Britain needs me.” Piers wryly notes that what Mr Gums needs is a mental asylum.

Next up is Joe, 54, with a delightful self-penned ditty which goes, “Call me a bounder, call me a rogue, I’m in love with Kylie Minogue”, and “What a lot of totty, I’ve never seen a better botty”. Cowell calls it “slightly pervy”.

But then Joe launches into another song — a touching story about the Falklands, and even Cowell is surprised. He is duly put straight through to the next round.

And so it carries on — one minute you’re laughing your head off, the next it all gets a bit emotional.

They all have different tastes — I learn Simon loves doggie acts, Amanda hates bad magicians and Piers likes singers who don’t fit into “Simon’s mould of beautiful Leona Lewis lookalikes”.

While they listen, they doodle — tellingly. Amanda draws flowers, Piers draws “psychotic-looking triangles and graphics” and Simon draws cars.

“He’s obsessed with very long cars,” Amanda chuckles. “And we don’t need an expert to tell us what that says about his personality.”

Next there are ferrets who do nothing except run riot, prompting Ant to make a popular return to stage as he hands back some critters that had run for cover.

Piers, who is bidding to steal Simon’s Mr Nasty crown, gets a laugh by noting: “They’re not even the best ferrets in this competition.”

Then Madonna from the Philippines comes on stage to tell us in a faltering voice she is here because she wants to make some money for her two young children back home.

She is in tears and Dec sweetly runs on with some tissues. She’d better be good or this will be tragic, not uplifting.

Thankfully she puts heart and soul into a rendition of I Will Always Love You. The theatre is suddenly silent for the first time all afternoon.

Swanky

Amanda is in tears and, to my embarrassment, I find my eyes pricking too. Madonna gets a very deserved standing ovation.

Amanda later reveals she got emotional because she’s been away from baby daughter Lexie for three days, adding: “It wasn’t very dignified — there was snot and everything!”

At this point Simon nips for a cigarette break and the others go out with him. The trio don’t have glam dressing rooms, just a poky little room to use between auditions — at Simon’s insistence. Piers reveals: “He gets bored. I have a swanky trailer on America’s Got Talent and it’s great for a bit but then you find yourself rattling around with nothing to do.

“So we sit in the same room and goad Simon until he loses his temper, which is always fun.”

When they return, there’s excitement as the show’s PR girl reveals she has found a bugging device in the judges’ room and its owners, two chancers who were listening outside in their car, have been arrested.

As Piers says later: “We’ve been sitting around reading magazines and talking about who’s had plastic surgery, which was very funny at the time but we’ve said enough to ruin mine and Simon’s careers and probably Amanda’s too.”

Later there are umpteen more dance troupes, tons more gymnasts, a plethora of singers — good and bad. There are a lot more children, some cute, some annoyingly precocious.

Piers and Amanda nickname Simon “The Child-Catcher” because he can be horrible to youngsters, though he seems almost paternal on the day I’m there.

Amanda notes: “It’s such a shame he doesn’t want children himself because although he pretends not to like them, he’s quite good with them. But his real baby is his Blackberry.”

There are lots of songs by Simon’s own Sony BMG artists. When he says, “That was a fantastic choice of song” to the choir who have just sung one of his hits, you know he’s actually thinking: “Ker-ching!”

And there are a lot of sexy men for Amanda to flirt with.

She purrs to a pair of topless male dancers: “What’s your dream? I’m going to have a lovely dream about you tonight.”

Backstage, Piers cringes: “It’s quite embarrassing, really. She thinks she’s a bit of a sex kitten, not entirely without reason. But sometimes when she’s leering at these young guys you can see they’re just thinking, ‘Yeah alright, Mum’.”

In her defence, Amanda tells me the producers always ask her to go first if there’s a good-looking man on stage — and she is merely “acting up” to make good telly. “I’m not as bad as Sharon Osbourne!” she laughs.

Clearly, the trio love to bitch about each other and wind each other up.

Banter

Simon and Amanda are regularly infuriated by Piers’ habit of asking what they think of an act during the performance, before he goes on first and nicks their best lines.

And the two boys love to go one better than each other.

I’m told Piers has sponsored Amanda £1,001 to run the London Marathon tomorrow purely because Simon had sponsored her £1,000. It’s affectionate banter and they get on well, though Simon usually spends evenings alone and is alleged to be “on the phone to LA, taking 15 vitamins, and going to bed with cucumber slices on his eyes.”

Piers and Amanda, meanwhile, sometimes go out for dinner, and Ant and Dec are so inseparable they always eat together.

At the end of the day, as I leave the theatre with my ears ringing from the boos, cheers and tone-deaf singing, I feel rather warm inside.

Whether or not Britain has talent is arguable, on the basis of what I’ve seen today.

After hours of filming, I saw perhaps only three acts worthy of a slot at the Royal Variety Show.

But if it hasn’t, Britain is most definitely eccentric, funny, good-natured and completely lovable.
Source: The Sun