Genuine variety and a cool act add to the final’s fun
The Britain’s Got Talent final (ITV, Saturday) is often predictable, but this year there was a dash of welcome suspense as the result could have gone several different ways. In the end, pianist Tokio Myers, took the grand prize (£250,000 and a slot at the Royal Variety Show). He was a worthy winner – his reworking of Rag’n’bone Man’s mega-hit, Human, was like nothing we’d ever heard or seen before on the show, and the fact that the affable 32-year-old Londoner was utterly flabbergasted made his victory all the more heart-warming.
Judge Alesha Dixon described Myers as “the coolest act we’ve ever had on the show” and she’s right – while most winners have their sights set on the West End, Myers is more likely to pop up at Glastonbury, collaborating with cutting-edge acts of the moment (he’s previously worked with Amy Winehouse).
In the absence of any dancing dogs, eight-year-old runner-up Issy Simpson brought the cute factor. Her magic act could easily have veered into precocious territory, but it was adorably innocent. With third place going to comedian Daliso Chaponda – at one point favourite to win – it shows that this year the audience were enjoying the genuine variety on offer, rather than voting for acts that could’ve appeared on singing shows.
Meanwhile, some of the performers who had been most hyped didn’t fare well – largely thanks to their own unfortunate blunders. No live show is going to go without a hitch, but magic duo DNA’S embarrassing hiccup – when their so-called mind-reading totally failed, as they guessed the wrong page number of David Walliams’s book – blew their chances. Their act was generally disappointing, veering so far into mind-boggling number geekery that it felt like an exam. Even Simon Cowell admitted that he was “too thick” to understand.
There were other awkward moments, too – nine-year-old comedian Ned Woodman forgot his lines, dance troupe Merseygirls nearly fell off a chair, and even reliable presenter Ant Mcpartlin messed up, getting Simpson’s name wrong.
Ultimately, the slip-ups added to the overwhelming sense of good, clean fun, with light-hearted acts, such as wacky entertainer Matt Edwards, netting considerably more votes than the moving Missing People Choir. Their version of a song from the film Ghost, complete with backdrop of their missing loved ones, had the studio in tears, and yet they only came eighth. BGT is a celebration of the frivolous and, in miserable times of national unrest, it was just what we needed. Isabel Mohan
Technically, if you do the maths, it was 70 years ago today: the Beatles sang “it was 20 years ago today” 50 years ago. But let’s not quibble. You need to be at least 64 to have any idea of the real-time impact of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band. Before, recording was achieved by means of string and sticky-backed plastic. The album’s first listeners heard a tectonic realignment in sound that is impossible for us whippersnappers to grasp.
Sgt Pepper’s Musical Revolution: with Howard Goodall (BBC Two, Saturday) attempted to demonstrate quite how mind-expanding the album was in 1967. Howard Goodall came at the task musicologically, delivering a sort of Open University lecture involving studio innovations, stylistic hybrids and lyrical invention.
It could all have veered into aridity. Goodall is from the anoraky end of the Fabological spectrum. “Genius,” he said, marvelling at the seamless join in the two halves of Strawberry Fields Forever like a repressed Brit praising a quality bit of welding.
There was much talk of modalities, falling chromatic scales, polyphony and – hold onto your hats – Aleatoric composition. Not all were fully explained. I still don’t know what the Aeolian folk mode is (more to the point, nor did Paul Mccartney when deploying it in She’s Leaving Home).
Nevertheless, Goodall was ideally placed to talk about the hired classical musicians who contributed so much to Sgt Pepper. I once interviewed John Burden, the French-horn player who fashioned a tune hummed by Mccartney into the parpy horn quartet heard in the title track. It may be the most frequently played recording featuring horns, I told him. “It’s time somebody gave me some royalties then, isn’t it?” he replied. The Beatles were geniuses, but they got by with a little help from their friends. Jasper Rees