This cruel show's popularity shames us all

IT is a hugely popular programme but it is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I refer, of course, to Britain’s Got Talent – the shameful cackfest that is pulling in the punters back to the (once great) ITV1, now re-branded especially for this column as The Moron Channel.

I think most reasonably intelligent people (errr, that’s probably no more than a third of Britain’s Got Talent’s viewers) will feel a little queasy about watching this freak-show-come-karaoke kontest.

Let me spell out why that queasiness, that stirring of moral consciousness (at last!) in bubble-headed modern Britain, comes from.

It comes from a residual – and correct – feeling that to showcase people as they are publicly humiliated, for the sake of making vast amounts of money for Piers Morgan, Simon Cowell and other ITV ghouls, is absolutely cowardly - and it stinks!

Take the case of Susan Boyle – the winner of the viewers’ phone vote last Sunday night. She’s a good singer, no doubt about it. But she is being encouraged to distort herself and cavort in a most unseemly manner by the ugly limelight this show has cast upon her.

It is not right to put a woman such as Susan Boyle through that process. I would say it is not good for her mental health. It is not good for the viewers either.

And on the same night Susan won, a 10-year-old girl, Natalie Okri, was rejected by a vote of the ghastly panel of Cowell, Morgan and Amanda Holden.

You could see the torture in poor Natalie’s face as she shuffled off in tears, shamed, and with a feeling of profound rejection rattling round her head, at the end.

No-one was there, in the few seconds when it mattered, to put their arm around her and comfort her.

And no-one was there, when it mattered, to stop her entering this dreadful series in the first place. The show's popularity shames us all.