"She had much the same training Elaine Paige got - just didn't do anything with it for a long time. Voice production, acting, the lot. That's a long step up from a few lessons with a local guy who advertises with a handwritten index card on the supermarket noticeboard.

"She's being presented as a naive untutored talent making it against a hostile world, when in fact she had exactly the skills required to do the job the media industry wanted done. . . ."

Jack—and others—let me explain a couple of things. I spent a three years at the University of Washington School of Music and another two years at the Cornish School of the Arts, a sort of intensive instruction conservatory. Around me were dozens of students who were taking lessons, practicing, learning music theory, studying up a storm with sight singing, ear training, performing in student ensembles—the works. Considerably more intensive than the kind of training that Susan Boyle may have had. Many of my fellow students had dreams of concert careers.

Some of the people I went to school with, I heard of later on, making their way down their chosen musical path. But the vast majority of them vanished into obscurity. Became church organists or choir directors, teachers, or just plain couldn't cut it in a music career.

Training can only polish what you already have. The moment of truth comes when a performer gets up in front of an audience. So regardless of whatever training she may or not have had, and regardless of whether or not the television show was a carefully stage-managed phony set-up—when the time came and she was out there, alone, on the stage, Susan Boyle delivered.

Don Firth