BGT...to big time
Amy Lou set to pen song of her life with Whitney’s hitmaker
BRITAIN’S Got Talent runner-up Amy Lou Smith plans to tell her life story in a power ballad penned by Whitney Houston’s team.
The tanning salon worker was 30 weeks pregnant when she went on the show last year, and baby Aida was born just hours before her audition aired.
Now the pair are “singing through life together”, even though Amy Lou lost out to comic Viggo Venn in the final.
Since then, however, Amy Lou, 35, has forged a friendship with Allan Rich, who wrote Whitney’s megahit Run to You.
He has also come up with songs for the likes of Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Ray Charles and Sir Rod Stewart.
Amy Lou says: “He watched the show and saw something in me. I’m going to LA in a couple of months’ time and we’re going to get to a studio and go from there. “We had a meeting two weeks ago – that’s when it all became official and we decided the first song was going to be about me. I’m such a real person. I’m still so down-to-earth, and I want to give you my story.
“My past hasn’t always been perfect. I’ve had rough times and it’s going to be about that to encourage people that no matter how bad times get, there’s always a rainbow.”
Since BGT, Amy Lou, of Tipton, West Mids, has been travelling the world and singing on cruise ships.
And she says she, Aida, her son Hudson, five, and her partner have a “lovely new big house” thanks to the show. She adds: “BGT has given me that platform to completely change our lives.”
■ Britain’s Got Talent continues on Sunday at 7.40pm on ITV1 and ITVX.
When Netflix unveiled its gritty new drama Baby Reindeer, the first question many of us had was – how long before the real Martha shows up?
For the uninitiated, the show tells the story of Martha, a stalker, who latches on to a struggling stand-up comedian and makes his life a misery.
Given that it was based on the real-life experiences of creator Richard Gadd, it seemed inevitable that amateur internet sleuths would soon be trying to find the woman who inspired the depiction of his fictional stalker.
And if they found her, surely she would relish the attention that being a central character in a major international TV show would bring?
Oh no, we were told, that’s not going to happen, we’ve taken steps to protect her anonymity. But last night, a woman who claims to be the basis for Martha gave her side of the story to Piers Morgan’s YouTube series, Uncensored.
She told him that almost everything about the series, which starts with the words “this is a true story”, was a lie.
Branding Richard as “psychotic” and the “ultimate misogynist”, she insisted that virtually every aspect of the series he’d written was “completely untrue” – including that she’d been to prison for stalking.
Now viewers will have to decide what they believe.
The woman flatly denies sending thousands of texts and email messages, and claimed the drama had been: “Very, very defamatory to me, very career-damaging.”
Claiming she’d received death threats from viewers as far away as the US, she insisted: “I’m not a stalker. I’ve not been to jail, I’ve not got injunctions. This is complete nonsense.”
And the self-proclaimed real-life Martha – who the Mirror has chosen not to name – said she was “forced” to reveal her identity in order to defend herself. “On the internet, sleuths
I’m not a stalker, I’ve not been to jail.. this is nonsense
WOMAN WHO CLAIMS TO HAVE INSPIRED ‘MARTHA’
Anything that could lead back to her has gone
PRODUCER AHEAD OF THE SERIES DROPPING
tracked me down and hounded me and gave me death threats,” she said.
“So it wasn’t really a choice. I was forced into this situation.”
The news that she was going to give the TV interview sparked a huge reaction from the many millions of UK viewers who’ve watched the chart-topping seven-part series.
Some thought it was only fair that she got the chance to do so, while others found the whole idea “exploitative” and argued that someone who has grappled with serious mental health issues should not be given that sort of platform.
Netflix has said that the emails and messages which appear on-screen in the show were the actual ones sent to Richard by his stalker over a period of four years – 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, letters running to 106 pages and 350 hours of phone messages.
But speaking to Piers last night, the woman insisted she’d only sent him “a couple of emails” containing “banter”.
Pressed on who might be behind all the other messages, she said: “I have no idea.” She then claimed Richard had made them up and that she’d turned down his sexual advances. The self-proclaimed “Martha”, 58, did admit to owning four mobile phones and having up to six email addresses, which Piers pointed out was extremely odd.
Asked if she planned to take legal action, she replied: “Absolutely. Against both him and Netflix.” But with no money to back her legal plans, she intends to represent herself.
Richard, 34, portrays Martha as clever, having described her as being a woman whose “only skill greater than her ability to harass was her ability to evade the law”.
Netflix is now coming under fire after the woman’s claim to have been identified as Martha.
Richard himself plays Donny, a version of himself, while The Outlaws star Jessica Gunning portrays his stalker and Tom Goodman-Hill takes the role of Derrien, a TV executive who groomed and then raped him.
So did Netflix and the producers made enough effort to try and protect the anonymity of the woman who inspired Martha, given that the story revolves around her and that she had no input into the series? At the show’s media launch in April, executives felt sure that the woman who harassed Richard for many years was unlikely to come out of the woodwork.
She didn’t make an appearance after he turned his stalking and sexual assault horror into an award-winning Edinburgh play, they reasoned, so we don’t think that she will give us any trouble now. It seems that they simply did not foresee this scenario.
One executive producer from Clerkenwell Films revealed there was an exclusion order in place which prevented Richard’s harasser from making contact with him – meaning she would be arrested if she turned up at the launch in London’s Soho.
And she insisted there was no chance of viewers rumbling fictional Martha Scott’s real identity because they had been at pains to digitally airbrush her out of existence.
Asked how much the stalker knew about the series ahead of it dropping on Netflix last month, the TV exec said it was unclear. “We don’t know because we’re not allowed contact,” she explained. “And if you Google anything on here, it won’t come up with her on the internet with her real name and what really happened. Everything is disguised.
“We’ve made sure and Netflix’s legal team has made sure. Anything that could lead back to her has gone.”
She said any decision for the stalker to unveil her own identity and put herself forward for interviews was “out of our control’.
“Obviously, we were really aware when we took on this story that there were implications in that respect,” she explained. “We’re making a show with real people involved, so we’ve taken an extreme amount of care that they couldn’t be identified and we’ve taken an extreme amount of care that they are presented with understanding.”
In the series, Martha is indeed portrayed sympathetically at times, with Richard taking responsibility for mistakes he made.
The Baby Reindeer producer added: “What we tried really hard to do was make sure that Martha was portrayed in a way where she’s not the baddie and Richard’s not the goodie.”
But despite the measures taken, and a plea from Richard himself, one woman says she has been unmasked and is considering legal action.
As for the predatory male TV executive, one innocent man has already had to be defended by Richard, who urged: “Please don’t speculate on who the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
It may not have been, but it does seem like an inevitable consequence.