Screenhead

And just when you think a  movie about the creation of Facebook is strange. News is just in that Julian Jarrold, director of Becoming Jane and the remake of Brideshead Revisited, is in talks to direct a film charting the rise of Paul Potts. And who is Paul Potts? No, it’s not about the leader of Cambodia’s communist movement (now THAT would be an interesting film). Paul was the rather shy young man who wowed the audience of Britain’s Got Talent with this video of him singing an operatic aria. The clip has raked in millions of hits since it hit Youtube in 2007. Since then Paul has gone on to release two albums and has sold them in the millions.

But do we really need to see the story of this in movie form? The majority of winners of these .. Got Talent or.. Idol TV shows seem to end up as one-hit wonders, quickly releasing a record to cash in on the immediate success, and then swifly fading away into cabaret hell. And besides Potts’s rise to fame and fortune, is there really enough dramatic material to warrant 90 minutes? And even if there was, it seems almost futile to portray such backstories when our TV’s and PCs are already inundated with video clips and gap-filling retrospective shows, bringing us through the tabloid headlines covering their lives (and it’s not like this story will be new to a US audience, as in 2008 America’s Got Talent found their own Potts in Neal Boyd). Or will we be surprised by a film of Beckettian wit, in which a man stands in a  mobile-phone store for hours waiting for something to happen? It seems unlikely that a film of Potts would be anything more than a dull biopic, detailing the major facts of his life,  offering little more than a sadly excessive 15 minutes of fame, and deservedly ending up as a Saturday afternoon TV movie.