BGT’s yoga party

Coming up with answers

THE Knowledge: The Taxi Test World’s Toughest have to revealed cabbies streets and memorise 25,000 Not easy as: 100,000 landmarks. show from “Memory studies span 2000-2015 our attention Not fell to eight seconds.” studies just that. Memory 2015 show from 2000- our attention span fell to… THERE was a moment early doors last night when it became clear that Britain’s Got Talent was back to its best.

Part two of Jim Fitzpatrick’s four-act magnum opus, when he walked out on stage trailing an extension lead with a papier mache ship over his head and started involuntarily wriggling around to Rock The Boat, by The Hues Corporation.

The kind of magnificent, screw-loose act that’s been the show’s lifeblood for 11 years now. And boy, didn’t they throw the kitchen sink at the series curtain-raiser.

Teenager Sarah Ikumu’s extraordinary voice. The mother of all sob stories from the Missing People Choir and a song you couldn’t fail to be moved by.

Simon Cowell somehow restraining himself to just one “big fat yes”. And yet BGT retains the same old frustrations.

So we have David Walliams’s tiresome “my Simon” routine, meaningless audience natter, judges pressingssing each others’ buzzers, Cowell turningrning increasingly toothless, Walliams alone in understanding how the golden buzzer works and unannounced professional acts pretending they’re nervous newcomers.

Case in point, adequate singing impressionist Jess Robinson, a veteran of at least 17 TV series, who still had to tell us who her Katherine Jenkins and Sharon Osbourne were.

Cocking

You take the rough with the smooth, though, with BGT, because the whole is so much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Magician Niels Harder wasn’t half as funny as either his name or the rollingaround panel would have you believe.

But he was the catalyst for the brilliant hosts’ best work of the night – Dec, as Ant had his head in a guillotine and with the Dutchman writhing about in front of him to the words “Niels goes harder and the magic gets bet better”, , noting accurately: “What a way to go.” T The standout audition, however, was undoubtedly the “doga” (human yoga with a dog) by Mahny and her Maltese terrier Robbie.

“It’s very natural, it’s mutual, it’s symbiotic, it’s organic…” It’s blummin’ funny, is what it is. And so, sat with her leg around the back of her neck and gently yanking Robbie, who was definitely thinking about wandering off, back on to the mat, she began: “Breeeathe deeply. In and out through your nose. Connect with your dog and boooow. And riiiise up into the boat. Your dog is the sailor and you’re the vessel…”

I was already in a heap. And then she upped the ante by getting the hosts and judges with their pooches to join in on stage.

What followed will go down as an alltime classic BGT moment, but just know it involved much bum-sniffing, leg-cocking and urinating in Walliams’s shoes.

You can’t take Amanda Holden anywhere, can you?