This story just touched me, deeply.  If you want to hear him sing, you'll need to go and search for "Paul  Potts opera" on youtube.com or on the internet.  Last week I found 10 references to him and today, several thousand.

I saw Paul Potts' audition.  An odd little man comes out with broken crooked teeth in a rumpled suit looking frightened, unsure, embarrassed, desperate and as though life has ridden him hard.  Piers, the actress and Simon look resigned and put out when he said "I am here to sing opera."  Out of this disheveled man, pours the voice of a tenor angel.  Every note is pure and clear.  He manages in the space of under 3 minutes to give so much range of emotion that you feel the meaning of the words.  He sang Nessum Dorma.

Simon's jaw dropped, the actress cried and Piers looked quite taken aback.  They invited him to return.  Mr. Potts left with his head hung low, lacking confidence and a bit sad.  He could not quite believe, this carphone salesman, that the audience had given him a rapid fire standing ovation and that most of the women were crying.

He returns and someone has had the good sense to dress him in a tuxedo with a wine colored bow tie.  He looks dapper and a little more confident.  He sings "A time to say goodbye."  Once again, he brings a range of emotion and it is more potent than before.  He bows this time.  He smiles.  He brings Simon Cowell a new level of jaw drop.  THe actress cries again.  Piers tells him that when they formed the show, he and Simon had hoped to find someone with an amazing talent and give them a platform to showcase it and that Paul has to be exactly what they had envisioned.

He returns again, this time a tux with a black tie.  He walks out, head held high, smiling, relaxed, confident.  He sings an aria that is just stunning.  He walks away with the 100,000 pound prize.

In interviews I have watched, he has stated that he will use the money to pay the debt off for his singing lessons, some 30K pounds worth.  He wants to have his teeth fixed a bit and take his wife on a holiday because they never had a honeymoon.  He is, in fact, a trained opera singer who has never managed to secure a place in an opera company.  He attended a master class with Pavarotti who was impressed with his vocal abilities, but sadly and embarrassingly, Paul didn't have enough money to pay for the entire set of master classes. 

He was struggling along to sing and learn and hone his skills when things took a hard turn.  He ruptured his appendix.  Then, they found a 10 cm tumor on his adrenal gland.  When he was recuperating from surgery to remove what was a benign tumor, he was injured on his bike.  He and his wife, whom he met on the internet, were working 16 hour days to pay the bills and try to pay off his debts from singing lessons.  He sold carphones in South Wales, UK.  He had had to give up his lessons and had not done a lot of singing recently.  He considered that Britain's Got Talent was his last chance.  If he failed there, he figured he was out of options and he'd not sing anymore.

So, Paul Potts will sing for Queen Elizabeth in December, as part of his prize.  He has offers to record and as one interviewer remarked, a lot of the requests for him to make an album have come from the US and he seems to be bigger in the US even than in the UK because of the internet. 

I am in line to buy his album.  Voices like his, so expressive and emotionally expansive, are rare in opera.  If you get a chance, look him up and listen to something special from a humble man who, appearance by appearance, is watching a big dream become his reality.