1. The working title of the show was Paul O'Grady's Got Talent and a pilot was made, but the presenter quit ITV for Channel 4, forcing producers back to the drawing board.
2. Simon Cowell has only ever missed one day of auditions on any of his shows. He was sick with flu during the Birmingham leg in February and Louis Walsh stepped in, which will appear in the upcoming series.
3. Ratings for last year’s final results show peaked at a record 19.2million.
4. One of the discoveries of the new series is an 81-year-old grandmother. Frail Lanarkshire widow Janey Cutler gets a standing ovation at the Glasgow auditions for her rendition of Edith Piaf’s Je Ne Regrette Rien.
5. Simon Cowell generally wears black (occasionally branching out into grey) and visitors to his homes claim he even uses black loo roll.
6. Susan Boyle is currently Britain’s biggest musical export. Her debut album has sold 10m copies worldwide, gone platinum in 25 countries and was the top-selling album of 2009 – despite only being on sale for the last six weeks of the year.
7. There are 41 international versions of the show, in (deep breath) Ireland, America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Austria, Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Georgia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.
8. In the pipeline is The World's Got Talent, a competition between 25 winners of series around the globe for a million dollar prize.
9. Singing Swansea schoolboy Shaheen Jafargholi, who was 12 when he reached last year’s final, was invited to perform at Michael Jackson’s planned series of 50 London concerts. When Jackson died weeks before the gigs, Jafargholi instead sang at his televised memorial service in front of a 2.5billion global audience.
10. Last year’s runner-up Susan Boyle reportedly gets £500,000 for a corporate gig. Winners Diversity command just £10,000, split between 11 dancers.
0 comments:
Post a Comment