VIDEO: Paul Potts in action
Paul Potts! Paul Potts! And again — Paul Potts! A cellphone salesman from Wales turned the Web upside down last week; he wrote his name in gouts of flame upon the walls of Time, via YouTube clip from BRITAIN’S GOT TALENT that sped from blog to blog like news of a miracle. Potato-headed Paul, whose pallor, awkwardness, and general metabolic ambiance suggest a man thoroughly marinaded in loneliness, fiddles with his fingers and says that, for him, “Confidence has always been a bit of problem.” His smile is gently tortured; his compressed frame exhales a sort of mothballed humility. Then he moves toward the mic and announces to the panel that he is going to sing — wait for it — opera.
Cue haughty looks from the judges. Simon Cowell (for it is he) sucks his pen in anticipation of a classic loser flame-out, another imploding fattie. But Paul (for who knows how long?) has been cherishing an angel in his bosom — a rich, passionate voice that climbs impeccably through the strains of “Nessun dorma” until old ladies in the crowd are helpless with emotion and the pen has dropped from Cowell’s mouth. You will be moved, damn you. As Martin Amis once wrote of his papa, the gouty Kingsley, by the time I’d finished watching, my face was “a mask of unattended tears.” Paul went on to win the entire competition and is now, my sources tell me, romantically “involved” with Prince William’s ex, Kate Middleton. I think I need some new sources.
No one could doubt, however, the fine romance at the heart of last week’s INTERVENTION (A&E, Friday at 10 pm). As Andrea swung into the motel parking lot with five grams of crack in her bag, she mused on the character of ex-boyfriend Andrew, who was waiting for her in one of the rooms. “Usually he has all the dope, and he always has the upper hand,” said Andrea. “Tonight I have a little bag of my own.” Andrew, ever solicitous, called Andrea on her cellphone with his room number: “I want that BJ,” he added. In the half-lit room, they bickered sweetly over stray lumps of crack: “Where’d it go? There was a big chunk right there!”; “I didn’t touch it. Stop accusing me of stuff.” Toxic vapors coiled around a cheap lampshade while the bed gradually unmade itself — a beautiful atmosphere. But soon Andrew, tender-hearted swain that he is, began to feel unrequited. “I asked you four times for a blow job,” he complained. “You know what? You’re not gonna give me a blow job — fuck you.” And he left. Andrea kept her head: the evening was not over. There were still a couple of grams to smoke. “I feel sketchy, paranoid, anxious,” she wheezed, with the evil fumes struggling in her lungs. “Just a terrible feeling, terrible. This is where I don’t like crack at all.”
Intoxicants also flowed freely in the ULTIMATE FIGHTER 5 (Spike, Saturday at 9 pm) group house, where the combatants unwound on a surge of collective inebriation. Food spattered the walls, a window was broken, Rob Emerson body-surfed across a fully loaded kitchen table, and Cole Miller abandoned himself to sociable feelings. “Joe Lauzon!” he cried, embracing the quiet Lauzon on a couch. “Why’d you have to kick my ass?!” “Cole is a very, shall we say, feminine drunk,” explained Brian Geraghty. Miller ended the night asleep on the toilet, having his head shaved by a giggling Manny Gamburyan. The final bout of the series will take place this Saturday, June 23, when the pint-sized mauler Gamburyan faces the semi-feral Nate Diaz. My money’s on Gamburyan: not an attractive fighter by any means, all sweat and homicide, but there is something indestructible about him. I can’t imagine him being beaten without the aid of large pieces of concrete.
Bear Grylls, meanwhile, was thrashing through the Everglades in the second-season premiere of MAN VS. WILD (Discovery Channel, Friday at 9 pm), feasting on maggots and hurling himself into sinkholes. If you get lost in the subtropical marshlands of South Florida and you need to find your North, here’s what you do: tie your water bottle or some other floating object to a tree and wait for an hour. The body of water that makes up the Everglades is a hundred-mile-long river flowing southward at the speed of soup, so eventually your homemade compass will be pointing toward Florida Bay. As he splashed through the knee-high swampwater, Bear mentioned the deleterious effect of constant wetness on morale and emphasized the need to keep one’s spirits up while “surviving.” “He’s always talking about that,” said my wife, knowledgeably. She is a huge Bear Grylls fan.
Sheer aggro on IT’S ME OR THE DOG (Animal Planet, Monday at 8.30 pm), as jackbooted troubleshooter Victoria Stilwell was brought in to discipline two shrieking lapdogs: Tyson, a two-year-old Maltese, and Pixie, a three-year-old Pomeranian. The combined yapping of these two skittish, sneezy animals reached 115 decibels: it seemed a miracle that they had not already been stamped upon. “As loud as a chainsaw,” commented Victoria. “Fifteen minutes a day of that and you’re risking permanent hearing loss.” As always, there was a marital issue to resolve: the dog’s owner, Antonella, had kicked the gormless Lee out of the queen-size so she could snuggle with her dog babies. Victoria was appalled. “We have to get these two sleeping together again!”
Next week: hilarity-based unscripted drama with NBC’s LAST COMIC STANDING. Stay tuned.
