Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
Subject: Susan Boyle, "She doesn't know her place" Mon Apr 20, 2009 7:17 pm
If you're not living under a bridge talking to fleas, you've probably heard the name Susan Boyle and likely been one of the more than 60 million people worldwide who've viewed her variety show performance on YouTube.
I've been thinking a lot about Susan and the similarities in her story to her predecessor, mobile phone salesman Paul Potts who won the first season of the same reality TV show, Britain's Got Talent.
The thing that made Susan's appearance on the show all the more remarkable was that she faced a hostile audience that openly mocked her, yet she silenced and won them over within four or five bars of her rendition of Les Miserables' 'I Dreamed a Dream'.
Potts faced no such hostility during his audition in 2007 and the reason was he knew his place: he was fat, ugly, poorly dressed, a typical schlub and the look on his face when he fronted the judges was almost pitiful - like he was bracing for the inevitable rejection and bullying that had crowded his youth.
Susan Boyle, however, did not know her place: she was old, fat, ugly, dowdy, unemployed and didn't pluck her eyebrows, yet she had sass, she refused to shuffle meekly onto the stage, her body language said "like it or lump it" ... As New York magazine put it this week: "When Boyle waddled onto the stage, looking not at all like the pre-packaged pop stars on Idol, the audience started sniggering before she'd even opened her mouth: the salt-and-pepper frizz, the red face, the most spectacular unibrow this side of Frida Kahlo."
"Just before her performance, Ms. Boyle swiveled her hips suggestively, and every bottom on every sofa in Britain clenched in horror and shame."
Why?
Because we hate it when people don't know their place: it's why so many of us stop to stare at fat women in bikinis on the beach, why we sneer at the poor when they bling it up or try to act "posh", why we mock the "ugly" when they attempt to be seductive or sexy.
It even applies to the rich and famous and it's why we enjoy it so much when people like Paris Hilton or Russell Crowe try to branch out of their field of "expertise" and crash and burn in singing careers.
They don't know their place.
Susan Boyle is fascinating because though she didn't know her place, in many ways she's more aware of it than countless other women and men who chase an impossible aesthetic.
Consider for instance that Susan is 47-years-old, a full three years younger than Madonna and the exact same age as George Clooney and you get a sense of how topsy turvy is the world in which we live; where we mock a female who ages as nature intended and obsess over celebrity plutocrats who deny decrepitude.
Amanda Holden, the 38-year-old Britain's Got Talent judge called Susan Boyle's performance "the biggest wake-up call ever" and you have to again ask why?
Collette Douglas writing in Glasgow's Herald put it best when she said: "Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect."
"If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person."
I don't buy this entirely of Susan Boyle. I bet she's widely known and liked in her home town and far from a non-person, but I doubt any of the local youngsters cheering her in this video looked up to or wanted to be like her.
That's all history now because we've all been able to witness a person's life literally change before our eyes, and it's my sincerest wish it will be for the better.
Let's just hope she doesn't start shagging Guy Ritchie.
Subject: Re: Susan Boyle, "She doesn't know her place" Mon Apr 20, 2009 8:57 pm
It wasn't singer Susan Boyle who was ugly on Britain's Got Talent so much as our reaction to her
Is Susan Boyle ugly? Or are we? On Saturday night she stood on the stage in Britain's Got Talent; small and rather chubby, with a squashed face, unruly teeth and unkempt hair. She wore a gold lace dress, which made her look like a piece of pork sitting on a doily. Interviewed by Ant and Dec beforehand, she told them that she is unemployed, single, lives with a cat called Pebbles and has never been kissed. Susan then walked out to chatter, giggling, and a long and unpleasant wolf whistle.
Why are we so shocked when "ugly" women can do things, rather than sitting at home weeping and wishing they were somebody else? Men are allowed to be ugly and talented. Alan Sugar looks like a burst bag of flour. Gordon Ramsay has a dried-up riverbed for a face. Justin Lee Collins looks like Cousin It from The Addams Family. Graham Norton is a baboon in mascara. I could go on. But a woman has to have the bright, empty beauty of a toy - or get off the screen. We don't want to look at you. Except on the news, where you can weep because some awful personal tragedy has befallen you.
Simon Cowell, now buffed to the sheen of an ornamental pebble, asked this strange creature, this alien, how old she was. "I'm nearly 47," she said. Simon rolled his eyes until they threatened to roll out of his head, down the aisle and out into street. "But that's only one side of me," Susan added, and wiggled her hips. The camera cut to the other male judge, Piers Morgan, who winced. Didn't Susan know she was not supposed to be sexual? The audience's reaction was equally disgusting. They giggled with embarrassment, and when Susan said she wanted to be a professional singer, the camera spun to a young girl, who seemed to be at least half mascara.
She gave an "As if!" squeak and smirked. Amanda Holden, the female judge, a woman with improbably raised eyebrows and snail trails of Botox over her perfectly smooth face, chose neutrality. And then Susan sang. She stood with her feet apart, like a Scottish Edith Piaf, and very slowly began to sing Les Miserables' I Dreamed A Dream. It was wonderful.
The judges were astonished. They gasped, they gaped, they clapped. They looked almost ashamed. I was briefly worried that Simon might stab himself with a pencil, and mutter, "Et tu, Piers, for we have wronged Susan in thinking that because she is a munter, she is entirely useless." How could they have misjudged her, they gesticulated. But how could they not? No makeup? Bad teeth? Funny hair? Is she insane, this sad little Scottish spinster, beloved only of Pebbles the Cat?
When Susan had finished singing, and Piers had finished gasping, he said this. It was a comment of incredible spite. "When you stood there with that cheeky grin and said, 'I want to be like Elaine Paige', everyone was laughing at you. No one is laughing now." And it was over to Amanda Holden, a woman most notable for playing a psychotic hairdresser in the Manchester hair-extensions saga Cutting It. "I am so thrilled," said Amanda, "because I know that everybody was against you." "Everybody was against you," she said, as if Susan might have been hanged for her presumption. Why? Can't "ugly" people dream, you flat-packed, hair-ironed, over-plucked monstrous fool?
I know what you will say. You will say that Paul Potts, the fat opera singer with the equally squashed face who won Britain's Got Talent in 2007, had just as hard a time at his first audition. I looked it up on YouTube. He did not. "I wasn't expecting that," said Simon to Paul. "Neither was I," said Amanda. "You have an incredible voice," said Piers. And that was it. No laughter, or invitations to paranoia, or mocking wolf-whistles, or smirking, or derision.
We see this all the time in popular culture. Do you ever stare at the TV and wonder where the next generation of Judi Denchs and Juliet Stevensons have gone? Have they fallen down a Rada wormhole? Yes. They're not there, because they aren't pretty enough to get airtime. This lust for homogeneity in female beauty means that when someone who doesn't resemble a diagram in a plastic surgeon's office steps up to the microphone, people fall about and treat us to despicable sub-John Gielgud gestures of amazement.
Susan will probably win Britain's Got Talent. She will be the little munter that could sing, served up for the British public every Saturday night. Look! It's "ugly"! It sings! And I know that we think that this will make us better people. But Susan Boyle will be the freakish exception that makes the rule. By raising this Susan up, we will forgive ourselves for grinding every other Susan into the dust. It will be a very partial and poisoned redemption. Because Britain's Got Malice. Sing, Susan, sing - to an ugly crowd that doesn't deserve you.
Subject: Re: Susan Boyle, "She doesn't know her place" Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:48 pm
Choir Rejected Web Fave Susan Boyle
Susan Boyle, the Britain’s Got Talent singing sensation, could probably join any choir she liked. But that wasn’t the case two months ago, when she was rejected by a local group. “We had no vacancies,” a rep tells the Mirror. “It was a shock when I saw her on the television.” Boyle had auditioned for the reality show when she approached the choir.
Rather than having anything to do with Boyle's voice, the secretary claims the group was just too small: "We are a very small choir so we didn't want to be top heavy. So we just couldn't have too many singers."
Subject: Susan Boyle, "She doesn't know her place" 
Mon Apr 20, 2009 7:17 pm
