This creative provoked the TV mob to launch a complaint to the Kensington and Chelsea rozzers. The Saturday final audience watched a wounded Cowell’s emotional appeal for the nation’s trust. Heaven forbid that an entertainment mogul would consider manipulating the career of a starlet!

I thought this plea for trust was like Stevie Wonder asking a car hire company to allow him to take a family saloon.

To ensure the quality of any reality show is difficult. When all is said and done, Britain just isn’t brimming with world class talent waiting to be discovered. Reality show formats prove that, no matter how much hype and primetime TV exposure, very few global superstars are likely to be unearthed. This is a primetime format, hooking a nation and desperate advertisers.

The glycaemic rush of hyperbole is inevitably followed by a low as the punters recognise the tell-tale signs of yet another humdrum finale. Turd polishing is an impossibility, but we feel more cheated by the lacklustre. The time has arrived when the hype that intrigues and engages us must produce a star or a glittering career. If the hype fails in that task, the spectre’s crooked finger of disengagement beckons.

It’s been widely suggested that production teams are forced to prime the pump and unearth genuine entertainment hopefuls. The format can’t survive on a diet of freaks and Jeremy Kyle wannabes; to make good TV there have to be some certs. So I think the suggestions that Parkegate was one giant PR stunt is rather naïve. In this age, great stunts contain no risk. Why would the format guardians allow prying eyes to take a good, hard look into production tactics?

To play with a highly valuable format for the sake of some column inches or allowing executives to get their piranha-like jaws into Britain’s Got Talent is the equivalent of contracting format Syphilis. Sure, the tabloids were sniffing blood and were close to unsettling the pack, but my guess is that the PR minders and TV execs reminded the potential kiss-and-tell contestants of the enormity of the NDA they had signed and not to suggest any impropriety.

Why would the showbiz ghetto destroy Britain’s Got Talent? Better to keep the format alive. There will be a time for this show to be put to the sword a few years down the line. The Dark Lord loves hype, he understands its force for ratings. Parkegate did add interest and got the nation talking – but let’s face it, we all know who the real winner is.

Like a Chinese meal, it is all you can taste and think about, but when it’s finished it’s forgotten and all you want is the next fix of foodstuff. There’s news, there’s excitement, there’s hyperbole scattered all over the place like MSG – and then it’s gone.

Of course, we are at the point that everyone is most interested in – the freak parade. Never mind the machinations behind the scenes or the commercial value of the brand; this is what the people most care about; the narrative, the crazies.

Given that it’s all about BGT right now, will we ever know the truth of what caused Cheryl Cole’s American X Factor exit and non-admittance to the UK judging panel? I doubt it, as the people have spoken and what they want is the tears, the heartache, the visceral stories, whether good or bad. What use is a nation’s sweetheart without some pain? We’ve used up the divorce tears – here’s the next weepie Cole adventure.

We know that Fox had a part to play, and Cowell, and many other factors, from agents to stylists – but it barely matters so long as the newspapers and Twitter benefit.

Brian Solis says that Social Media is creating its own ego systems. To survive, brands, businesses and celebrities should ride the shift in public perception and develop market strategies to work these ego systems. They need to recognise the shifts for what they are, however – the public has taken built in obsolescence at the heart of celebrity and business and celebrates it wholeheartedly – the nation no longer cares for yesterday’s cast offs. It only cares for the now.

We are living in one giant QVC-style shopping channel trading in celebrity; not a format that creates longevity. There’s no need when the consumer gladly moves on as soon as the sleb stops living in the now and starts thinking about the future.

Consumers are setting up information networks and are happy to be governed by social media connections. They expect the information to come to them in the instant – hardly anyone seeks out information elsewhere any more. They want it all NOW!

Yet, since no one is focusing on the past, no one is contextualising what’s happening now either, so let’s try to. Only people with platforms triumph – hence we see Cheryl Cole becoming cannon fodder to the march of the platform she’s been ousted from. High profile she may be, but she’s still just cannon fodder. It’s the people who’ve been spat out of the system who can offer most context on what is happening within the machine, but the machine has programmed us to expect a retrospective in ten years time asking “where are they now?”, at which we’ll grunt with slight recognition at the participants of all the old formats who never made it and then move on. There is no room for context in that model.

Fans and followers are firing up the process so it runs ever faster. Image is as disposable as a burger container. There is no point to super injunctions; the law is a blunt stick – and anyway, it’ll all be forgotten tomorrow.

Only a few are managing to succeed; Jedward are a prime example. But then they make no references to the past and they don’t care about the future – they may have represented Ireland at Eurovision, they may have met Obama but they have skins like rhinos and they don’t care. Their career is now and we have got to the point where the audience don’t trust people who talk about a future.

Maybe you just have to be stupid to succeed. Or, as I heard Simon Cowell tell a Britney impersonator: “Never mind the negativity. Ride it!” Salient lessons for Cheryl Cole and anyone else wanting to enter the social media whirl and the giddy world of celebrity in the 21st century.

After watching Britain’s Got Talent – the Dark Lord’s other bastard child – on Saturday, it was obvious from the slow media pick up that something was missing. Taking its first wobbly steps without Daddy, I wondered if it could ever be as successful. Could the new panel of judges cast the same spell and begin to bewitch the nation? Could its freaks and fame-hungry dreamers deliver the same connection to the media, on and offline?

Michael Mcintyre, jester-in-chief to the great unwashed, probably has the stuff; the Hoff is in another time zone; and funky, tender Auntie Amanda Holden looks lost as she tries to take the lead. Without Cowell, it all seemed a little trite; he’d left them with the formula, but the gold dust was missing.

I think this prize content is under threat and may well struggle to survive without the Cowell influence. The cold facts are that he has created formats which are driven by his enterprise and commercial zeal. Understanding Cowell’s determination, one can begin to understand how he reinvented the entertainment event TV formats. His ability to create, star in, steer and publicise his creations is second to none.

Cowell’s talismanic on-screen persona is only one particle of this noxious brew. Commentators fail to acknowledge his personal focus off screen. Crucially on and off screen, his adherence to the craft of hype is awesome. When he is on the ground he is welded to the production. He comprehends the minutiae of the human components – the canon fodder, the folk who deliver the ongoing narrative. This attention produces a peculiar promotional thrust, a jet-propelled ballyhoo.

Make no mistake, Cowell leads from the front, and he ensures everyone understands his high expectations. He expects 1000 % because he gives 1000% . There must be an unconscious fear of failure for the new teams; they are the talent in the shop window, but who will be driving the back office? If standards wane, Cowell’s absence will be felt.

Concentrating on another territory, in another time zone, Cowell’s task in hand is to engineer a massive distraction. The lurid headlines framing his mother’s concern for his health is not idle, tabloid hype. Cowell is flesh and blood welded to mind-boggling ambition. Leaving others in command, Cowell’s inability to steer the format’s promotion might prove to be hid Achilles heel. “From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, when he’d come unstuck in another nation’s chilly hinterland while in pursuit of greater power and glory.

The USA is the entertainment capital of the world and naturally the ultimate prize, but Cowell must ensure he maintains his energy to focus on the narrative engine to ensure it feeds the PR agenda.

I offer this nugget of wisdom: If all fails, success means going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. After all the unbridled success, if Britain’s Got Talent stumbles, it will serve as an early wake up call for Cowell.

Unless you’re in the UK, that is, in which case you’ll be watching episode seven of 13 and the spoilers could really hurt your enjoyment of this remarkable series. The start of the series may have been brought forward in the UK, but we’re still too far behind. In today’s social media world, the narrative is just not as powerful when the story is out of sync in different parts of the world with a (fairly) common language and culture – it is diluted by spoilers and web-chatter.

True event TV benefits from Twitter and the Twitterati show fans of Britain’s Got Talent, the X Factor and the Inbetweeners offer great examples of tweet chat from the sofa. A great way to pull in more followers is to use show hashtags and demonstrate sharp wit that can be retweeted. True entertainment brand-love usually has a crowd that engages with Twitter. But it is hard to engage properly when a global source like Twitter is moving faster than the shows its users love. For narrative TV brands like Mad Men to keep up, they need to be shown as close to simultaneously as can be achieved to avoid dilution.

For the next series of Mad Men, mind you, they will need all the PR and web-chatter they can muster just to achieve the amount of coverage the show gets in the UK at the moment, as it will debut for the first time on a Sky subscription channel, alongside all of the output from HBO. I suspect many more people will be driven to file sharing, not only to avoid having the narratives of their favourite shows spoiled before they’ve seen them but also to avoid paying fees for what was previously free to view.

And now, a sneak preview of Mad Men’s radical new direction for season five.

It doesn’t help that this latest series has seen all the same clichés spilling out onto our screens once again. Too many of the same old freaks are attempting to ‘live the dream’. There’s Janey Cutler, who is clearly is in line to be the next attempted SuBo; there’s a comeback kid in the shape of the drummer who was awful last time but in the running again because everybody loves an underdog; there’s the same old ‘outrageous’ acts that Simon can make a pretence of being turned on by.

And that’s not to mention the endless slew of small, speechless children in tears, dog acts and double acts with one partner is better than the other – whom Simon will invariably offer a ‘choice’ having stopped the act midway through.

I suspect that there is a fair amount of ‘freak show disconnect’ amongst the British public, and that they are getting less and less interested. Has Britain’s Got Talent got enough tricks up its collective sleeve to engage conversation and journalists or has it gone the way of Big Brother and lost interest to formula and over-scripting?

The fact that they use the same old script, from tired critique to equally tired enthusiasm, can pall. All the people who ‘are here to win’, are or want to put their hometown ‘on the map’ need, perhaps, to find a talent for original sentiments. And the judges too: how many times have you heard them say ‘I wasn’t expecting that’, ‘you’ve got three yeses’ or ‘that was my favourite by far’? Frankly, if the judges got goose bumps every time they claimed to, they’d probably develop a serious skin complaint.

Barnum knew that if you put extraordinary freaks together you would have a show. He also knew that you had to have something more than just shock value, cheap laughs and a relentlessly repetitious ‘live the dream’ style script. Talent runs deeper than that, and, though the public like formula, a Saturday night TV show has to have some substance and show some willingness to move forward if it is to survive.

There’s an enormous amount of talent out there – just look at the kid doing a Lady Gaga cover on the net who garnered 8.5 million YouTube hits in three days. He’s doing well because he’s writing his own script, not submitting to the tired formulas of others.

So is the reality bubble punctured? Talent shows have come and gone, but this one has to survive, if only to provide much needed advertising revenue. All shows dip into decline. Has this format got the power to survive longer than most?

One thing’s for certain – if it fails, then we are likely to see significant cracks forming in the Cowell Empire. I will be looking for a demonstration of truly potent PR skills in the coming weeks. Britain’s Got Talent needs to create serious engagement before the audience begin to opt out in far bigger numbers.

There seems to be no way Brown can escape his political doom if there is to be more coverage of a stunt going wrong than of the actual meaning of the stunt. Brown is reduced by the Press Association release to stating that Kiely is “a wonderful guy” whilst Diversity’s choreographer Ashley Banjo is quoted as saying: “Our lives completely changed because people backed us and believed in us.”

I’m sure Gordon’s been wishing he could say as much for years now…

Floral tributes for Michael Jackson in LA

The allegations of paedophilia that haunted Jackson’s final years have all but disappeared and now is the time for a show to close that chapter of Jackson’s life – a show to end all shows and to begin new ones. The funeral seems to be gearing up to be a show for people to demonstrate love and adoration for Jackson – but it also seems to be more about the people commemorating Jackson than about Jackson himself. Shaheen Jafargholi, who sang a Jackson song on Britain’s Got Talent, will be there, singing alongside Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey and more.

Like Princess Diana before, the crowds are gathering to mutually support each other at the Staples Centre and mutually assure that they forget the rough patches in Jackson’s life. But I’m more interested in the people who aren’t going to be there – David Blaine is in this country, Lisa Marie Presley is abroad. How will they be mourning?

The media gearing up for Jackson's funeral

There’s another funeral Jackson’s looks set to resemble – that of Phineas Taylor Barnum. It’s curious, given the freakish nature of much of Jackson’s life in the limelight, that his funeral should resemble that of the man who travelled the world with a freak show. But Barnum was canny enough to know that he was dying and well loved enough to get a copy of his own obituary a day or two before he died. It’s hard to imagine Jackson even countenancing the idea that he might die.

Here’s a report on the funeral of Barnum, written a little after the event over 100 years ago.

“The morning was cold, gray, and dismal. Nature’s heart, with the spring joy put back and deadened, symboled the melancholy that had fallen upon Bridgeport. No town was ever more transformed than was this city by one earthly event. On the public and private buildings were hung the habiliments of woe; flags were at half mast, and, in the store windows were to be seen innumerable portraits and likenesses of the dead citizen, surrounded by dark drapery, or embedded in flowers.

“Nor was this all. The people on the street and in the windows of their houses seemed to be thinking of but one thing–their common loss. The pedestrian walked slower; the voices of talkers, even among the rougher classes, were more subdued, and in their looks was imprinted the unmistakable signal of no common or ordinary bereavement.

“The large church was not only filled, with its lecture-room, a considerable time before the hour set for the services; but thousands of people crowded the sidewalks near-by for hours, knowing they could only see the arrival and departure of the funeral cortege. The private services at the house, “Marina,” near the Seaside Park, which preceded the public services in the church, were simple and were only witnessed and participated in by the relatives and immediate friends.”

More preparations for Jackson's funeral

It will be interesting to see how long the current state of post-Jackson euphoria-in-loss lasts – a lot of smoke went up over the allegations that marred his final years. Will any of it be blown away in the coming months? One thing is certain; if a brand is powerful enough and has enough money behind it, anything unsavoury can be made to disappear, as the fixers at MGM proved in the 1930s.

I’ll close with another quote from the report on Barnum’s death:

“When, in 1889, the veteran brought over his shipload of giants and dwarfs, chariots and waxworks, spangles and circus-riders, to entertain the people of London, one wanted a Carlyle to come forward with a discourse upon ‘the Hero as Showman.’ It was the ne plus ultra of publicity. There was a three-fold show–the things in the stalls and cages, the showman, and the world itself. And of the three perhaps Barnum himself was the most interesting. The chariot races and the monstrosities we can get elsewhere, but the octogenarian showman was unique. His name is a proverb already, and a proverb it will continue.”

Jackson was, without doubt, a huge brand at the heart of a huge, freakish circus and was the most interesting thing in it – as the recent outpourings prove. But will Jackson become a proverb – or just a bogeyman? Only time will tell.

There is no doubt that Barnum would have loved Britain’s Got Talent – a cost-effective format that gathers a collection of strange and strangely determined people into its fold and pushes their saleability, if they have any, to the hilt. It’s nothing new – Russell Birdwell conducted star searches for Selznick International back in the 1930s, the Harry Potter films made a public search for their star. The only new thing in the mix is the ability to spread word on the show’s latest runaway idol to the world in seconds flat via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere.

Cowell is a remarkable man, who puts the business into show with enormous skill. With Britain’s Got Talent, he has recognised, as Barnum did, that there is a vast well of public desire to ogle. They invest briefly in the people that X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent draw out of the woodwork, admire them and root for them for a time when the sing or perform well – within a certain set of strictures – and then watch as they sink slowly and unwillingly back into oblivion.

There is a huge appetite for the fairytale ending on TV shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, but beyond the fairytale endings, real life isn’t that simple. The audience is always going to want to know what happens next. The pressure of expectation, especially on a global scale, is enough to make anyone crack, let alone a woman with learning difficulties who has been plucked from obscurity and plunged into the vast acid bath of fame. Susan Boyle may be an ugly duckling who has become a swan, but what happens when the public find the next ugly duckling to swoon over? What it amounts to, from either end of the process, is too much pressure on the shoulders of Susan Boyle.

Susan Boyle is very unlikely to be anything but a one hit wonder. I’ll stick my neck out and say that it may well be a mega-hit on the back of all the euphoria because yes, she has a very good voice. Britain’s Got Talent has lifted her from obscurity, but the trouble is it also seems to expect her to deal with the pressures of fame on a scale that nobody could have predicted. The show side-steps the well-worn cliché of the long pub tours and constant struggle that has marked the progress to fame in the past – a process which was still no guarantee of steeling the acts it produced for the sudden onrush of the corrosive processes of mega-fame. Despite the quality of Boyle’s voice and the willingness of the public to love her at the moment, I still can’t see this as a lasting love affair.

I’m not attacking Susan Boyle when I say that I don’t think that people will pay to see her perform in six months time. I just don’t think she’s got the wherewithal to withstand the pressures of fame and I don’t believe the public will stick with her, because too many of them are too in love with the moment of her transformation to consider or care what happens beyond the happy ever after moment of that one big hit, other than to watch her implode. She is not a role model because there is no room for role models in the world of ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap’ celebrity.

What I am attacking is the process, the public expectation, the weight being placed on Boyle’s shoulders. As I told the Times, “’You can’t pluck somebody with those issues and fix them overnight. This has been a fantastic soap opera for the fame-makers, Syco [Simon Cowell’s record label] and Talkback TV. I’m not suggesting that they are cynical and deliberately looking to exploit, but they have got their eye on the buck. They’ve done very well out of Paul Potts and they want to see what they can make out of this. We are beginning to see more and more people who are casualties of the process. Jade Goody was over. She was resurrected by her illness.’”

If Boyle overcomes the caustic nature of fame and makes a real go of it – wonderful! I’ll gladly be proved wrong. But I honestly believe that she will have one huge hit and then slowly disappear, most likely because the public will have found another fairytale to follow. If that happens, I just hope the realization that it’s all gone away doesn’t destroy an already palpably fragile woman. She doesn’t deserve that.

The discussion, Hype and Glory, with the Guardian’s Marina Hyde and our excellent chair, Paul Blezard, was wide ranging and got an excellent response from the audience. Marina wanted to reclaim the world from celebrities and wanted real people with real talent to get recognition. Why should Angelina Jolie be the face of the UN when there are committed and talented people out there who, though less glamorous, do all the hard and amazing work that Jolie is employed to make palatable to the people.

The crux of the talk was who will stop the process of fame at any cost and foreshadowed the results and aftermath of Saturday evening’s Britain’s Got Talent final perfectly. The media love a good celebrity meltdown and there is no doubt that the people who own the formats dictate the stars – and the events on Britain’s Got Talent and in its wake prove this without the shadow of a doubt.

It’s great that Diversity won – here’s a group of talented dancers who represent the best of Britain – but it’s the meteoric rise and post-loss wobble of Susan Boyle that will hold the media’s attention for longer. It’s clear that Boyle has problems – she was diagnosed as having learning difficulties as a child – and has invested way too much of herself in the rollercoaster media ride through the talent contest, as her admission to the Priory for ‘exhaustion’ proves.

Jan Moir at the Mail summed up Boyle’s performance as follows: “Boyle did seem a trifle unsteady, not to mention tranquilised during the final. Yet I still phoned in my vote for her, because she delivered the most compelling and thrilling performance of the evening.” To read the entire article, click here.

The programme has a duty of care to its contestants, but how far will they take that when there’s money at stake?

Proof of the sell-out

Carole Malone, in her column in yesterday’s News of the World, worries about this too: “TV bosses have a duty of care to EVERY contestant on that show-but Susan needed more support and I don’t think she’s had it. I just hope they don’t – but I worry that once BGT is over, the powers that be will wash their hands of her. No one wants to be responsible for her losing it or coming to any mental or physical harm-especially because of a show that purports to change people’s lives for the better,” she wrote. To see her entire column, click here.

There have always been troubled stars – from Gwili Andre, who I have discussed here (and in my book The Fame Formula) before, to Judy Garland. Back in the glory days, however, the stars were protected from the ugly side of fame and the intense scrutiny that is now the norm. Now, of course, we are getting to see the nightmare of fame thanks to the people’s constant, urgent need for soap opera and the media’s willingness to supply it.

On another note, I noticed that David Milliband slipped into the discussion – perhaps to learn a bit more about spin and how to patch up tarnished reputations – just as I was getting into my stride about the need for people such as myself going into schools to talk to children about the true price of fame. It was noticeable that the more political I got about fame the more uncomfortable he got, to the point that he slipped out almost as soon as he’d arrived. A shame; it would have been interesting to get his viewpoint…

David Milliband in the Hay green room