Warning: Curmudgeon alert

So someone finally showed me the Susan Boyle video that’s been making the rounds lately. She’s a 47-year-old Scotswoman, a choirist, who wound up on one of those mean-people “talent show” programs that are so popular these days. You know, the ones where instead of risking having the bad taste to enjoy a performer’s actual performance they show cool people’s faces during the performance so you can tell if you’re making the right choice? Oh, and to make sure you aren’t confused they mug horribly if they don’t think you should like a performer, and smile and gently shake their heads as if in wonder so you’ll know you should like the performer too.

Anyway, Boyle’s got the sort of great, room-filling voice that’s prized by show-tune impresarios, opera conductors, and choir directors. She’s also not beautiful the same way people who are paid to look cool on TV are beautiful.

And so everybody mugged awfully when she walked out on stage, and mugged worse when she said she wanted to sing a love-affirming song. And then she began singing and was really good so all the cool people stopped mugging and started smiling and gently shaking their heads. The live audience was so impressed by the switch to smiling and head-shaking that they all stood up and started cheering.

After the performance the smiling head-shakers said a bunch of condescending bullshit.

Anyway, since I hadn’t seen it I hadn’t registered any of the previous online commentary, but Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors sums the whole thing up rather nicely. Here’s a snippet.

When Simon tells Susan Boyle she is a “little tiger” I really wanted to throw up. She rolls it off with a lot of equanimity and class. The only thing that makes watching the portions of the video clip in which the judges are speaking tolerable to me is the utter joy the entire experience seems to bring to Susan Boyle.

She said it here.

There was a program in the 1970s called the Gong Show. It too was a talent show with a panel of judges. One difference was the judges weren’t paid to be cool. Another difference was that the judges had buttons on their desks that would ring a big gong that signaled that they were rejecting the performance or…

...the performer.

Which is what I thought about when I saw the program staffer’s reactions before, during, and after Susan Boyle’s performance.

Perhaps not surprisingly I couldn’t find the exact clip from the Gong Show I was looking for. The one that reminded me so closely of the “cool people’s” performance as Boyle sang.

Instead, here’s a clip of the same performer from an episode several months after the first. The intro by the host is significant. “Right now let’s bring back a terrific lady…”

Her name is Bobby Tremain.

The reason I couldn’t find the first clip, and why I’m not surprised, is that the first time ‘round one… or maybe more than one of the judges let her get about one verse into the song… maybe as far as when she started playing and tap dancing, and they rang the gong.

Why? I don’t remember who the nobody daytime “celebrities” were back then (anymore than I’ve heard of the daytime celebrities hired to be judgmental about Susan Boyle) but the one who stands out in my memory had Paul-Linde-fey kind schtick and he explained that he rang the gong because “that poor woman, that poor little old lady, I didn’t want her to die up there!”

There was much chittering, not all of it enthusiastic, from the audience. The host’s plastic smile never faded. Ms. Tremain was pretty speechless but clearly disappointed.

There was considerable outcry from the non-studio audience, however, and so they had her back. And let her finish. Three years later Tremain one the over-eighty tournament on another game show, Tic-tac Dough.

I bring all this up because Tremain, like Boyle, was talented, energetic, and enthusiastic. And like Boyle she didn’t fit the stereotypes of the judges who, in both instances, made their judgments based their preconceptions that people who look like X should be expected to do only Y.

I’m not ashamed for having watched The Gong Show because I was a very young and the two broadcast-only alternatives were worse. There are many more channels today, and many more choices of programming. I would be ashamed if today I watched whatever program it is that Boyle transcended. For one thing I’m a big boy now. For another I have my own sense of taste. For another, having been an amateur performing musician and singer I appreciate how much work goes into even the least praiseworthy performance. And so I have no patience for trained monkeys paid to mug or gently smile and shake their heads based on their preconceptions, their prejudices, and possibly anticipation of bananas from their producers after the show. I have to say I might watch the show if they had gong buttons on their desks like the old show… it would be amusing to watch the cool people try and master the technology to push them.

%@#*&!!!