The singer not the song

By now every media commentator in Britain on every subject including global warming has delivered his or her opinion about Susan Boyle, the woman of unremarkable appearance who went on Britain's Got Talent and proved to have such a remarkable voice that an aria from Les Miserables acquired the celestial overtones of a solo passage from a cantata by Bach and even such exalted arbiters of taste as Piers Morgan and Simon Cowell were reduced to helpless protestations of awe.

Mr Cowell, for his own part, has a set of teeth so uncannily perfect that you can see why he has to spend so much time in America, the only country that will admit such a display of radiant gnashers through customs without X-raying the rest of the body they are attached to, to see if any part of it is made of enriched uranium. Yet Susan, face to face with these two improbably refulgent paragons, was unfazed, and launched without hesitation into her song.

Many commentators were able to spot that both men were suffering from an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, in which, while expecting the rest of us to admire them because they were so ready to admit they had been wrong, we would not despise them for having held such low expectations merely because the lady was not a glamour puss.

With those commentators I was in agreement. The conceit shown by Mr Morgan and Mr Cowell was deeply off-putting and if I had been on a special judging panel to judge the judges I would have told both of them to beware, because a name made from giving opinions in a television studio is a name written in water. There is no more perfect recipe for self-delusion than to suppose that being a television personality is some kind of achievement in itself. The best insurance to stop it happening is to keep a recording of say, Beethoven's 7th Symphony nearby in order to remind yourself of what an actual achievement is.

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The judges of Britain's Got Talent know quite a lot about the technicalities of putting a song over in a way that Ant and Dec might say wow to, but they don't know much about serious singing, which is a different thing.

In the opera house, music ought to matter more than anything but it remains true that one of the reasons people flock to hear Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca singing together is that they look the part almost as well as they sing it.

Things shouldn't be that way, but strangely enough they have become more and more that way in the last forty years, during the very period when feminism as a train of thought has done so much to educate us about the restrictive nature of expectations based on pulchritude.

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Today, most of the sopranos look like film stars. It could be said that the more our primitive male prejudices are broken down, the more we all become free. But one of the consequences of freedom is that ticket buyers are free to choose, and it is likely to remain a fact that ticket buyers of both sexes will choose to see the imported dreamboat. So unless all concerned are very careful there might be a worse injustice on its way for Susan than getting laughed at when she was first exposed to the audience of a show that depends on a regular supply of contestants who are there to be made a fool of. She might be trapped by an even more pitiless expectation: that she will go on being a big star beyond the point where she became a star because she didn't seem as if she could. Susan's future has undoubtedly been altered but we can only hope it has been altered for the better.

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It all depends on people having unequal characteristics, and one of those is appearance, in which there is no justice. In view of that fact, a man might try not to bellow with scorn when he sees a woman he regards as a frump. And then, when he evolves into a man a bit better than that, he can try not to look quite so smug when he congratulates himself for admitting that the frump has done something remarkable, and so on.

I was there to see my generation of males being educated by feminism. I was one of the males who most needed education, and I am all too aware that the process is endless, and can have many setbacks. To many women, our purportedly civilized West still looks like a man's world. Perhaps it always will, and one of the things that freedom has confirmed has been a man's freedom to remain prejudiced.