Simon Cowell Sued For Humiliating Contestant

Former Britain’s Got Talent contestant Emma Amelia Pearl Czikai is suing Simon Cowell for almost £2.5m ($3.8 million) claiming she was humiliated and degraded on ITV’s Britain Got Talent.  Czikai first lodged her complaint of unfairness and discrimination in January.

Obviously, Czikai is unaware of the first rule of good reality TV: Its supposed to humiliate and degrade its contestants.  How do you get masses of viewers to watch delusional people like themselves?  You promise that they’ll be humiliated in someway!

At last week’s pre-trial review in London, Czikai, who is representing herself, accused BGT and its judges of “exploitation, humiliation, degradation and barbarism”. The 54-year-old also levelled a claim of disability discrimination because the talent show had not made adjustments for her such as lowering the backing music and microphone levels.

“This programme makes a select number of rich people very very rich on the backs of the ordinary man and woman in the street through exploitation, humiliation, degradation and a reemergence of modern-day barbarism with all its inherent cruelty,” she said.

And she signed up for Britain Got Talent? No one put a gun to her head.  Its like going to Las Vegas, placing a bet or pulling the handle on a slot machine.  You might win, but you must remember that the House has the odds stacked against you.  Big winners are  strange and rare anomalies.  Susan Boyle’s success was a spectacular exception not the rule.

Czikai, a former nurse, claims that her performance suffered as a result of cervical spine neuritis, which can cause head and shoulder pain and which affects her ability to hear her own singing voice in noisy environments such as the audition arena. So there was a medical explanation for why she couldn’t carry a tune.  I guess that’s like playing roulette and being colorblind– it might hinder one’s ability to bet on red or black.

The pre-trial review, which will decide if a full hearing will go ahead, was told that she was seeking £300,000 ($465,000) for injured feelings, compensation of £1m ($1.5 million) and loss of earnings of £1.25m ($1.9 million). She said if she was awarded any money it would go to charity.

During her appearance on the show, where she attempted to sing the power ballad You Raise Me Up, judges Piers Morgan and Cowell hit their rejection buzzers even before she finished the first lyric. The third judge, Amanda Holden, managed to hold on until she reached the chorus.  Czikai has previously lodged a complaint with the media regulator Ofcom that she was unfairly treated on the program. The complaint was rejected.

I work in television.  I don’t really like reality TV and I think even less of the people who populate reality TV shows.  They’re delusional.  Oddly enough Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s father knows it doesn’t make sense.  He told the New York Times that he doesn’t understand the public’s fascination with his daughter:

“When we go to venues, I like to stand out in the crowd,” he said. “She’ll be up there hooting and hollering, and I’ll say to someone, ‘What is it that draws you to my daughter? Be honest.’ Because it’s very hard for me to see what it is. She don’t sing. She don’t dance. I don’t want to say she don’t have talent …” He seemed to have his doubts. Then he shrugged. “Everyone basically says they can relate to her. I think Nicole’s just a likeable person.”

That might be true.  But it doesn’t mean she needs to be on television.  Joan Collins said it best in an editorial in the Daily Mail last May:

This weekend, around 11 million people sat down to watch Britain’s Got Talent as another parade of frankly odd people exhibited themselves on the stage in the hope of convincing the judges they have what it takes to be a star, as if they knew the real meaning of the word.

Lest we forget, the motley crew included former porn star fire-eater Tia Brodie, who performed topless while passing naked flames over her body, a guitar-playing dog and a cross-dressing Lady Gaga impersonator. For supposedly Saturday night family viewing, it was an unedifying display to say the least – and there’s no shortage of wannabes who are desperate to run the gauntlet of humiliation in the hope of finding that elusive moment in the limelight.

Millions of ordinary people today have caught the fame bug, and not only do they believe their strange and frankly often unpleasant acts are going to catapult them into the public eye, so many of them also think it really is that easy. That five minutes of making a fool of themselves on screen really is going to bring them lasting success.

But think about it. Even if they do find notoriety on programmes like these, what is it going to get them anyway? How many people can remember who won Pop Idol or Britain’s Got Talent three years ago?

Andy Warhol announced years ago that everyone will one day have their 15 minutes of fame. Well, these days that prophecy is becoming a scary reality, even if that means that pretty soon so many people will be on TV they’ll be nobody left to watch it.

The truth is that most of today’s TV is coarse, repellent, amateurish and puerile. And the reason is that it’s all driven by reality shows that feed off these people who are so thrilled to be on TV they’ll appear for the price of a train ticket – if they even get that much for their trouble.