todd55devoe's blog: "american idol"

And another star is born. For 15 minutes or so, at least.

I’m talking about Paul Potts, of course, the unlikely winner last Sunday of Britain’s Got Talent, a U.K. version of American Idol (complete with Simon Cowell). Potts brought down the house and lit up the phone lines with a performance of Nessun dorma, the almost iconic tenor aria from Act 3 of Puccini’s Turandot. Quite an accomplishment for a homely, 36-year-old cell phone salesman with low self-esteem and really bad teeth. He has already been booked to record his first CD and sing for the Queen. Who cares if he doesn’t really have a whole lot of talent? The important thing is that he sang opera on a hit TV show and won £100,000 (enough for a makeover – “It would be nice to be able to smile naturally,” he told the Daily Mail in England. “I feel very self conscious about it at the moment.”)

Maybe there’s hope after all for humanity. If Potts can get the better of rap groups and all the other pop music acts he was up against, that has to mean something positive about music and taste – overseas, if not here, but that’s a start. (I don’t think an opera singer could get past the front door of the American Idol studio; this country will accept anything but classical singing on commercial television.)

Judging by the YouTube clips I’ve seen, Paul Potts has a very undeveloped voice and rudimentary phrasing. The sad truth is that Idol-izing audiences haven’t heard enough of the real thing to make serious judgments. Same for the TV show’s actual judges. I mean, Cowell is responsible for Il Divo, for heaven’s sake, as artificial, mediocre and superfluous a vocal ensemble as you could find.

That said, the sudden burst of fame and money might help Potts start on a serious course of training, so that his infectious enthusiasm and daring could be honed into a real vocal instrument, one capable of standing up to genuine operatic competition – and not merely reaching the level of the severely overvalued Andrea Bocceli.