Considering the thousands of performers who’ve appeared on TV talent shows through the decades, few managed to sustain a long showbusiness career.
I can’t recall from Hughie Green’s ‘Opportunity Knocks!’, its reboot ‘Bob Says Opportunity Knocks!’ (hosted by Bob Monkhouse) and ‘New Faces’any  more than a dozen contestants who became enduring stars.
Nevertheless, TV talent shows are very popular and require months of pre-production and auditions, during which the unpleasant nature of ‘interested’ parties can reveal itself.
I was given an insight into how obnoxious parents can be when pushing to get their offspring an audition by a friend who worked on a TV talent show that ran for several years.
Following the first series success, when Series 2 was advertised, the production office was inundated with letters, CDs and tapes from applicants.
One day my friend received a phone call in the office from a man he’d known slightly 20 years previously and hadn’t seen since.
As the ads for Series 2 clearly stipulated, ‘No ‘phone calls please!’, my friend was understandably irritated and his gut instinct that the caller was ‘up to something’ was justified when the man misguidedly addressed him like an old, close friend.
When the caller asked if he’d received a tape from his son, “Who’s a brilliant singer”, he was told it was probably among the hundreds of tapes the production team would eventually listen to.
This was not what the caller – someone with zero experience in TV production – wanted to hear. He abruptly said in what he thought was an intimidating tone “Don’t p*** down my back and tell me it’s raining!”
A Western fan, my friend immediately recognised the line from Clint Eastwood’s “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and that the caller wasn’t bright enough to realise he’d know this.
That the lad didn’t get an audition wasn’t due to his dad’s belligerence.
When the production team heard his tape, they realised something else the caller didn’t grasp was the meaning of the word ‘brilliant’.
Next time you watch “X Factor” think of the nonsense that the enormous production team has to put up with!