Just when you thought that Britain’s Got Talent couldn’t possibly get any more dramatic or exciting, along came Friday’s semi-final to prove us all wrong. When the dust finally settles on this series – and given the amount of media coverage it’s spawned we reckon this one could be in the headlines for a while yet – there wil undoubtedly be two things that people remember about it. The overnight sensation that is Susan Boyle. And the moment that 10-year-old Hollie Steele went into a semi-final meltdown as the nation looked on.

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Great TV to be sure, but ultimately there is a darker side to both of these occurrences if you look more closely into it. For those who missed Friday’s semi it saw 10-year-old Hollie – the fragile-looking little girl from Lancashire with the angelic singing voice – forget the words to Edelweiss midway through her performance and collapse on the stage in a crumpled heap of tears while her mum, Amanda Holden and Ant and Dec all rallied round to offer support.

Upon being told that there was no time to repeat her performance poor Hollie broke out into fresh weeping and pleading to be given another chance – step forward Simon Cowell, who promised that they would somehow “make time” for her to try it all over again. And wouldn’t you know it, she delivered a note-perfect performance second time around, won huge plaudits from the panel, got called “the bravest little girl in Britain” and subsequently won a place in the final via judges vote over male soprano Greg Pritchard (and I could go on about how the bizarre cloak he was put in made him look somewhat like a galleon in full sail, but that’s a whole other post…..).

Great TV it certainly must have been but how many people actually stopped to wonder what was going through that little girl’s mind when it all went so horribly wrong? Had Hollie not had the chance to perform again and not made it through to the final she would of course have gotten over it – and of course had the chance to try again at a later stage (after all if her voice is this good now imagine how it will be in a few years time…..) but at the time it must surely have seemed like the biggest calamity in the world. It would be bad enough for a grown-up to crack under such pressure but for a 10-year-old? No wonder she was so upset.

It’s all too easy for us to forget, sitting at home, just how young some of these contestants actually are, and the pressure for them to succeed may be doubly huge. But before we start blaming pushy parents and the like for putting their children in this situation,let’s just remember how many good young acts have done well this year without displaying such nerves – 12-year-old Shaheen Jafargholi and street dancer Aidan Davis, for example, both of whom have made the final, and of course Lagi, one half of the comedy Greek father-son dance duo Stavros Flatley (Stavros to WIN, I’m saying…..). And the little kids in Diversity. And Callum Francis and Natalie Okri who came so near to the final but just missed out. The list is endless. Just because one of them found the strain a bit too hard to take doesn’t mean we should start bleating about these talented youngsters being too young to take part. On the other hand, maybe a separate BGT spin-off for kids wouldn’t be such a bad thing. After all, you wouldn’t put 10-year-olds up against the finalists in The X Factor or The Apprentice, so maybe it makes sense for them to have their own, gentler version of Britain’s Got Talent also.

And speaking of pressure, there’s been a lot of negative press about Susan Boyle in recent days, talk of four-letter outbursts from her, of her quitting the show unable to take the pressure….the list is endless. She won’t, of course, and is still favourite to win, but given the bizarre circumstances under which she has become the most famous person in the country, isn’t this to be expected? She is, after all, an unassuming lady from a small Scottish village – albeit with a good singing voice – who literally went from being a nobody to a global superstar,in other words thrust into a situation for which she has been totally unprepared. Isn’t it understandable that at some point something had to give?

Whether or not Susan wins on Saturday night her future success looks assured, but whether or not she’ll be able to take the negative with the positive is another matter entirely. For every person who thinks she is fantastic there are bound to be more hiding in the woodwork who are only too happy to come out and criticise (remember we as a nation have a habit of knocking those who are unusually successful – even when we have made them that way…..) and for someone like her that’s not necessarily going to be easy to cope with.

But with so many good acts in the final, who knows what will happen……..?