Quality | 2009.06.04
The Susan Boyle myth | Libby Brooks
I\'ll be cheering Susan Boyle on Britain\'s Got Talent – just not the fantasy of exceptionalism being sold as part of the story
Perhaps I do have a talent for pizza. The other night, after a rubbish day at the office, I came home to a flyer from Domino\'s – official sponsors of Britain\'s Got Talent – offering me the chance to win 10 grand if only I could come up with an original five-topping combination capable of making it past a public vote. By that late hour, I wasn\'t feeling sufficiently talented to boil the kettle for tea, but it\'s always nice to be asked.
I know I should be grateful to live in a country that offers me so many opportunities to triumph over my tragedies. Maybe if I were to alight on the golden ratio of pineapple to pepperoni it would cancel out the fact that I am incapable of installing the wi-fi box, or that Ewan Watkins made me cry when he called me a Square Bear on the bus to swimming. And this is what 21st-century talent seems to be for.
On Saturday, a self-professed virgin spinster from West Lothian is odds-on favourite to win Britain\'s Got Talent. Her tragedies are manifest: living alone with a cat called Pebbles , being of a less than conventionally fragrant demeanour, failing to recognise it is inappropriate – if not nauseating – for a woman over the age of 45 to wiggle her hips on national television. Her triumph is to be in possession of an extraordinary voice.
And viewers found the combination compelling. Following her semi-final success on Sunday, when Boyle once again thrust her ample hips towards "Piersy-baby", judge Morgan no longer pursed his lips in disgust, but congratulated her on providing a beacon of happiness in a world be-gloomed by recession.
Of course I\'m pleased Susan Boyle dreamed her dream for so long and now it\'s come true. I\'m Scottish, for frick\'s sake, prone to sentiment as well as late-night aggression. But in this country, where dreams are never trod on softly, I doubt her success marks the end of cynicism. In many ways, celebrating how one woman can succeed only reinforces the certainty that most can\'t. Her popular moniker remains "the Hairy Angel", lest we forget her lack of requisite primping. And faux-concerned coverage of an alleged four-letter outburst – are virgins legally sanctioned to shout "fuck"? – would suggest that a good old backlash is well under way.
But what alarms me more is the vision of talent as a jack for the flat tyre of unhappiness, inequality or imperfection. Commitment to untapped talent, particularly in the young and disadvantaged, is one of Gordon Brown\'s favourite themes. But it is not everyone\'s moral duty to have a gift.
Over the past decade, the dominant theme in government policy has been that early intervention makes it possible to identify and assist potentially troublesome children before they go wrong. But this has also had the effect of marking out toddlers as lost causes before they\'ve even begun.
The flipside of this is the myth of exceptionalism – the idea that through talent, determination and luck, young people can transcend their circumstances, trouncing inequality. And it\'s a convenient myth, given that it completely obviates the need to tackle social exclusion.
But exceptionalism is a fantasy only ever applied to those that society is least willing to take responsibility for. There are one in a million Samantha Mortons or Tracey Emins. On very few occasions do ability and application alone provide a route out of poverty, and on fewer occasions do children possess such copious gifts in the first place. Inequality is inherent in the capitalist system, and meritocracy is its partner in crime.
The children that this country has most difficulty accepting are those the sociologist Christopher Jencks described as the "unexceptional disadvantaged" – the ones who can\'t dance or act or paint their way out of the cycle of deprivation. But they are no less deserving of concern because they will never go on to thrill an audience at Covent Garden.
As for Susan Boyle, and the talented tinies competing against her, they will allow us to be at our most mutable and casually cruel this Saturday. But if Britain really does have talent, it\'s a talent for ignoring the people who need us most.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]usan-boyle-britains-got-talent
