Britain does have talent (Britain's Got Talent)

Member Name: caz-3124

Product:	Britain's Got Talent
Date:	18/04/09 (96 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun show, very varied

Disadvantages: The crowd sometimes

Britian's Got Talent, shown on ITV, is now in its third series and is the idea of Simon Cowell who also sits on the judging panel of the American version of the show. The show is presented by Ant and Dec of Saturday Night Takeaway. The idea is that anyone who feels they have a talent can enter the show. So it's not restricted in the same way as say X Factor where you can only sing. Here you can do anything from dancing, magic tricks, animal acts, circus acts, comedy and so on. The winner of the series gets £100,000 and performs at the Royal Variety Show to the Royal Family.

The first step is pre-auditions where you go in front of the producer and they decide if you can go through to the audition shows that we see on television. So I am guessing that they pick out the best acts but also put through those that they know have no chance of winning but will 'make good TV'. If you get to the auditions you perform on stage in front of the judging panel and audience. The panel comprises Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan. I find Piers rather annoying. I think he's a bit slimy and just tries too hard to be cool and fails. Amanda is probably the nicest and has a tendancy to cry at the acts and of course Simon is the most harsh-tongued. They each have buzzers so they can press it if they don't want the act to continue. Normally an act has a minute to perform but if all three buzzers sound they stop early. They then get a yes or no from the judges as to whether they will go through to the next round and two yes votes are needed to go through. At a later date the judges pick a number of acts to go through to the semi-finals which along with the finals are held live and the viewers vote for their favourites.

In the past the winner have been Paul Potts who sang opera and I thought was fantastic and George Sampson who did a dancing in the rain act which I thought a little overrated. There have been some really odd ones I have seen including today a guy doing belly dancing, some funny ones where people have prepared tricks with their pets and then the animal either refuses to do anything and just sits there stubbornly or they get stge fright and run off the stage. You also get some people who don't take rejection very well and you always get a bit of controversy in the press like last year when choirboy Andrew Johnston claimed he was from a run-down estate amd got bullied all the time but then this was found not to be the case. I also think the audience are a bit harsh sometimes such as last week's Susan Boyle who everyone was sniggering at and then she sung and everyone was blown away. It also annoys me when the audience start shouting 'off off off' and booing so loudly you can't hear.

One of the things I like about this show is that there is less of the emphasis on the person and more on the act itself. With shows like X Factor the contestants are always going on about their hard life and how it would be a dream come true and so on over and over every week but you don't get it so much here thank goodness. I also like the fact that you never know what you're going to see from one minute to the next. My favourite act was probably Escala from Series Two, a string quartet, who I feel would have been worthy winners. I would say this is one of the bette reality shows which I am not really a fan of in general. I think this series is great fun in all.

Summary: One of the better reality shows