Britain's Got
Talent
To:
The Director of the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra
16, Clerkenwell Green
London, EC1R OQT |
From:
The Production Team
Britain's Got Talent
The London Television Centre
Upper Ground
London, SE1 9LT
|
Dear
Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,
Thank you for the
application for your orchestra to audition for
the UK television programme, Britain’s
Got Talent.
I have discussed your
request with Piers, Amanda and Simon, but
regretfully we cannot include the RPO in our
competition.
We fully accept the
assertion in your letter that the RPO is one of
the finest orchestras in Britain and that each of
its members is an exceptionally talented virtuoso
musician. This, however, epitomises the problem
we have in selecting acts for the auditions.
There is a tremendous
amount of talent in Britain. Every street in
every town contains singers, musicians and other
entertainers in abundance, many of whom bear
comparison with the best that we see on our TV
screens. The sole difference between these
performers and those who have become part of the
entertainment industry is simply that they have
chosen to follow an alternative career path.
There is certainly room in
each series for four or five such acts, as we
must have some good performances in the final and,
of course, one excellent act to appear before Her
Majesty. Good audience ratings, however, are
contingent upon most acts being publicly
ridiculed by the judges and audiences being able
to savour this humiliation from the comfort of
their sofas. We thus have a target that 99 per
cent of those auditioned must exhibit no talent
whatsoever and preferably attempt a bizarre,
embarrassing and potentially dangerous stunt.
This target might appear
simple to achieve, as among a population of 60
million there are many whose talents are not in
the direction of entertainment. Unfortunately,
nearly all of those people realise their lack of
aptitude for the stage and do not enter the
competition. It has proven extraordinarily
difficult to locate people who not only lack
talent but, due to some aberration of mind or
brain, are unable to recognise the fact.
During the early series of Britain’s
Got Talent, we came to realise that there
were only a handful of such individuals in the
whole of the British Isles. Indeed, the
production team are becoming increasing concerned
that most of these have now performed on BGT, and
there may be too few remaining to sustain another
series.
I hope you will now
appreciate why we cannot accept further
applications from the talented majority, and
particularly not from performers in the class of
the RPO.
We have come up with a plan,
however, which may address both the unfortunate
need to reject so much talent and also generate
enough cringingly diabolical performances to
televise and ensure the future of the show. We
are proposing that talented applicants audition
for the show, but not with an act that utilises
their skills. Some of your musicians, for example,
may have dogs. Perhaps some of those animals can
bark or roll over or similar to create a third-rate
dog act.
Feel free to let your
imagination and those of your performers roam
free. For example, we recently received an
application from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Although we obviously cannot accept any
performances by them that employ acting, we have
suggested that some of their number might wish to
jump naked through burning hoops.
We hope we might hear from
you with similar such alternative acts.
Yours sincerely,
Production Team
Britain’s Got Talent.
|
