Britain’s Got Talent: Connie Talbot through to final

Here we are at the final of Britain’s Got Talent (ITV1, Sunday, 8pm & 10pm) already – only nine days in, yet it feels like at least a week and a half.

I wonder if when Simon Cowell and his fellow judges, the journalist Piers Morgan and actress Amanda Holden, began they knew what they were letting themselves in for?

The nightly instalments have featured an erotic dancer who makes sparks fly off her pants, a boy who can make his ears squeak, a 6ft transvestite with a midget who becomes her horse, a 10-year-old stand-up comic and an octogenarian tap dancer.

There was Katie and Rupert the piano playing pig. “He’s not really playing the piano,” snorted TV’s self-styled Mr Nasty, Simon Cowell, “he’s just walking on it.” What did you expect Simon? A four-trottered rival to Richard Clayderman? A porcine Liberace? Someone in the live audience yelled: “It’s a pig!” And Cowell’s fellow judge Piers Morgan astutely pointed out: “Well, He’s not Stevie Wonder.”

And then there was father and daughter knife-throwing double act Little Firewater and White Dove (AKA Brian and Melanie) who were embarrassingly booted off stage because bungling Brian and his blazing blades were badly off-target. As Simon sympathetically explained: “We stopped you because we thought you were about to murder your daughter.”

As well as the on stage antics, there were one or two behind the scenes scandals. The impressionist Richard Bates was removed from the contest after police contacted producers to tell them he was on the sex offenders’ register and the Kit Kat Dolls were removed from the show for alleged “gross misconduct”. Lead singer Vanilla Lush and co-stars Alekssandra and Toni were all working as escorts, according to the News of the World. Lush, working under the name Cindy, even offered *cough* “personal services” to one of their reporters over the weekend.

And now after all the cat poetry, dancing dogs, piano-playing pigs and associated nonsense of the audition rounds, we’re down to the cream of the crop.

• Damon Scott – a 27-year-old ventriloquist who sang Michael Jackson songs with a puppet monkey called Bubbles.
• Bessie Curzons – an 11-year-old from Portsmouth who gave a winsomely energetic version of a Mary Poppins song.
• The Bar Wizards – Neil and Neil, professional cocktail ‘flarers’.
• Paul Potts – an operatic mobile phone salesman from Port Talbot with a heartbreakingly sad face who moved the audience to tears with his version of Nessun Dorma.
• The Kombat Breakers – a breakdance troupe from Coventry.
• And of course, child singing sensation Connie Talbot from Sutton Coldfield, who discovered she could sing while cheering up her terminally ill grandmother with a selection of songs from The Wizard of Oz. Her mother bought her a karaoke machine because the family could not afford singing lessons. After her rendition of Over the Rainbow on Britain’s Got Talent she was hailed as “the next Charlotte Church” and signed up to Cowell’s record label Sony BMG.

You really couldn’t make any of this up.

These finalists will perform with the aim of winning a slot in the Queen’s Royal Variety Performance, which this year comes from Liverpool. There’s also £100,000 up for grabs, but what’s a small fortune in cash compared to the chance to do your turn in front of Her Maj?