Uticopa Blog

My father once said to me: to be famous you need to say the right thing at the right time to the right person. How difficult this must be if, added to this, you also suffer from a mental health problem.

I Dreamed a Dream

Watching the YouTube video of Susan Boyle - from the ‘Britain's Got Talent' TV show - brought this home to me. Here was a middle-aged woman, who walked in front of an audience and got the typical reaction: laughter. How dare someone so old, plain and out-of-fashion, as well as having a slight mental condition, have the effrontery to think she was a star?

If you haven't watched the video, I recommend it. Not so much for her voice - which brings a tingle down the spine - but for the story it unfolds. 

When she is being interviewed before the audition in a busy TV studio by two patronising young media men, it emerges that she is nearly 48, unemployed and that she had suffered mild brain damage at birth. As she was growing up this had caused problems that meant she was bullied and belittled at school. 

There is something quaint about her manner as she keeps hitting slightly the wrong conversational tone. She has a strange, self-deprecating smile that is instantly recognisable by those who also suffer:  throughout her life she has been laughed at.

After her initial interview, anyone of any sympathy would at this point have felt sorry for her - sorry for her (apparently) misguided confidence, sorry for her ‘delusion' that she could possibly hold her own performing in a talent content and sorry about the growing obsession with celebrity among people who can only be hurt and disappointed by their immeasurable distance from it.

And then comes the moment when Susan walks out on the stage, her head held high despite her problems.  The many unsympathetic people in the audience, and on the judges' bench, start to sneer and jeer. It was so brutal, it reminds us of the jeering crowds long ago at a Roman arena, or even by the knitting grandmothers who used to grab a front seat before the Guillotine during the Bastille years in France.

The cameras panned across the young faces in the audience. All were laughing in sheer disbelief. And the judges too: Simon Cowell rolling his eyes and Piers Morgan openly sneering.

And then Susan started to sing..... From the first few notes of ‘I Dreamed a Dream' from Les Misérables, it was obvious that Susan was a star.  Despite her looks, despite her age, but more than that, despite her mental health problem, she was transformed.

There is a clear and strong message here.  Whatever problems you may face in this life - and mental health sufferers have more than their fair share - you can overcome them by becoming single-minded and convinced of your own abilities, irrespective of the sometimes brutal, ignorant views of other people.

For Susan Boyle, her confidence in her own abilities overcame her poor start in life. She alone transformed herself.

As my father would have said: the message was right, she projected it to the right people, and at the right time. We can all learn from her experience.
Now the world is her oyster.