The Tragedy Of Susan Boyle Is Just Plain Sad

The Tragedy Of Susan Boyle Is Just Plain Sad.Susan Boyle is living proof that you can never judge a book by its cover. In the spotlight, Susan Boyle’s melodi…

In one incredible year, Susan Boyle has gone from obscurity to global superstardom. But, as her family and friends reveal, it has come at a cost, while serious questions are being asked about the very nature of shows like Britain’s Got Talent

Has anybody ever become as famous as quickly as Susan Boyle? On 11 April 2009, she was known only to her friends and family in the small town of Blackburn, West Lothian. Ten days later, the video of her audition on Britain’s Got Talent had been viewed 100 million times.

It was the kind of global celebrity it took the Beatles years to achieve, Madonna, perhaps, a decade or more. Even Osama bin Laden wasn’t entirely unknown before 9/11. It’s a kind of fame that hasn’t happened to anyone ever before. Not on this scale. In this way. This was something of a whole new order: a new kind of fame created by new forms of communication, a throwaway item made for TV that travelled as far and wide as the web would take it, and Susan Boyle, a 47-year-old, unmarried woman from a former mining town in rural Scotland, was its first test case.

It’s britain’s Got Talent time again. This week sees the live finals and then, on Sunday, it’s up for a Bafta. What’s more, it’s widely rumoured that Simon Cowell, who endorsed David Cameron in the run-up to the general election, will be honoured in the Queen’s birthday list. But what of Susan Boyle? What has become of her?

The clip of her audition has been viewed 360 million times, more than any other video in history. Her first album, I Dreamed a Dream, sold more copies than any other album in the world last year. It went quadruple platinum and it’s still number one in Australia and New Zealand, as it has been in Britain, the United States, Spain, France, Israel, Portugal and 13 other countries.

But since her last major performance, exactly a year ago today during the Britain’s Got Talent final, she’s made only a handful of choreographed public appearances. What did happen next? How do you go from being a private person to one of the most recognised people in the world? From being entirely unknown to being voted the seventh most influential person on the planet by the readers of Time magazine, 14 places ahead of President Barack Obama? From living on benefits to being a multimillionairess?

It’s an absurd proposition, a bizarre one-in-a-billion confluence of what Jeff Jarvis, the digital commentator, calls “old media meeting new media and creating something we’d never seen before and couldn’t even imagine. It was a crossover moment. And she’s the edge case”. For Susan Boyle, it’s also a day-to-day reality.

She’s all this, a new media case study, a corporate profit engine, an academic object of inquiry, a figure of admiration, and also ridicule, famous across the globe, and actually still a person too, still living in the same small town.. Blackburn, just off the M8, is equidistant from Edinburgh and Glasgow but a world apart from either. A mining town whose mines closed decades ago, it’s a close-knit place with two well-attended churches and a solid working-class identity; post-election, Labour posters still festoon the streets (the local MP was returned with an increased 11,000 majority).

I’m not really expecting to find Susan Boyle here. I just want to talk to her friends, her neighbours. I’ve been told she’s recording her new album. I assume she’s in London or Los Angeles, but in fact she’s not just still living in Blackburn, she’s still living in the same house: the grey, pebbledashed council house that she shared with her mother until she died, the only evidence of international celebrity being a teenage boy in a beat-up Honda who’s parked outside her gate.

When I go to ring on her bell, he leans out of the window and announces that he’s from “Clockwise Security”. The whole thing is faintly absurd. Susan Boyle is one of the most lucrative recording artists in the world, after all, but then BoyleWorld is in many ways a strange, absurdist universe where the normal rules of physics don’t apply. That the source of Sony Music’s potential 2010 profits is sitting inside a semi-detached on a council estate guarded by a teenager who looks like he failed the screen test for Trainspotting is in some ways no more than you’d expect.

It’s easy to forget that Susan Boyle didn’t actually win Britain’s Got Talent in the end – the dance group Diversity beat her into second place – and after weeks of increasingly erratic behaviour, she finally suffered a breakdown and spent a short stint recovering in the Priory.