It seems to have been a longer ride this year, but we’re there at last: the Britain’s Got Talent Semi-Finals.

Maybe the sheen is beginning to tarnish: once you’ve seen one terrifyingly stentorian middle-aged lady making an abused border collie do some ballet for a molecule of bacon, you’ve seen them all.

Or perhaps we’re just getting older now: the pensioners who are so desperate for human interaction that they’re glad to spend an evening singing 40s standards while standing in an expanding puddle of piss seem less like our great-grandparents and instead step depressingly up the ancestral ladder.

Either way, this year’s Britain’s Got Talent has been an oddly dispiriting one. But now it nears its conclusion…

Firstly, Spelbound. Arty dogwank from a bunch of semi-naked kids. Really, nothing to write home about (unless your mum is a chairbound arthritic unable to drag herself to the nearest arena for whichever Cirque Du Soleil franchise is currently playing there).

Spelbound obviously have a ton of enthusiasm, 15 stone of gymnastic talent and a couple of grams of experience in putting on a big-stage show. That’s fine; their average age seems to be somewhere towards the end of the second trimester.

But Spelbound shouldn’t be in the final, because… well, who cares, it’s done now. Congratulations, British public.

You sillies.

Secondly, Olivia Archbold. She’s 14 years old, her ancestors have a wild disregard for the letter “i”, and she has a pair of lungs which some renegade surgeon has quite clearly stolen from Whitney Houston (replacing them with the medically surprising choice of a pair of Tesco’s plastic bags).

To put it another way: Olivia Archbold is 14years old, and she has been put onto a stage before the nation wearing a prostitute’s makeup box on her face, and a thin white cotton dress which becomes translucent under the onslaught of studio lighting on her body.

What we’re saying is, Olivia Archbold has a wonderful voice – if this was a woman singing, we’d still be impressed, so for a girl to sing this well? Outstanding – but she also exposes the slight mental ‘wrongness’ which we feel with some choices made by the Britain’s Got Talent production staff.

For example, in our recent searing takedown of Alyn James, we suggested that he looked like a psychiatric patient. Turns out, not only was that more of a profession for him than dentistry, but the Britain’s Got Talent producers allegedly knew all about it before they let him sing. We’re guessing this is likely the reason why Britain’s Got Talent have removed Alyn James’s video from the YouTube, and are now stripping clips on that site of judges’ comments.

Anyway, Britain’s Got Talent‘s adultification of children aside, Olivia Archbold needed to go through. By which we mean that if the cute little girl with the big voice ends up actually winning, we’ll give serious consideration to self-disembowelment with a butter knife, but she does deserve to be in the final.

Thirdly, Kevin Cruise. Looking like the bizarre genetic offspring of Rod Hull, Graham Norton, and A Packet Of Bacofoil, Kevin Cruise emerged onto the Britain’s Got Talent semi-final stage on the tip of a huge container of seamen.

From this thoroughly heterosexual beginning, Kevin Cruise managed to rock our expectations by delivering a performance even more masculine than Jedward being backed by a chorus line of Brazilian transvestites and singing Liza Minnelli songs to an audience consisting solely of  – for some reason -  a row of tents, and some coins which each have the monetary value of 15p.

Oh, Kevin Cruise, how we adore your dignity-free performances, and we do so look forward to seeing you face-off for the judges against Olivia Archb… oh, shit. Again: Britain, you are rubbish.

So, the judges had to choose between Olivia Archbald and some guy called Tobias Mead who did a locking/popping combination which wasn’t quite as good as that guy who works Camden Market on a Saturday. You know, just before the religious bloke turns up with his placards and his bibles and his probably-self-loathing-desire-to-rid-the-world-of-men-who-like-other-men’s-willies.

Piers Morgan – look this is becoming a little humiliating for all concerned. Can’t Britain’s Got Talent provide him with one of those Stephen Hawking computers, or something? -  tried so hard to say things. Sadly, all we made out was sounds which were exactly like those made by a female frog spawning into a pot of warm jam. By the edit, we assume he voted for Tobias Mead.

Amanda Holden gave some conciliatory words to Olivia Archbold, then turned her literally laserlike gaze upon Tobias Mead. We have a Britain’s Got Talent insider, who tells us that her next words – not broadcast to the nation – were “Tell me, exactly which servo leg motors did you employ during the fifteenth second of that performance? I have the UTL-88091-4Z34 models fitted: would they be able to replicate these motions?“

Sadly, so keen was she to learn more about his inner workings that she, too, voted Tobias Mead through.

So, with a deep sadness that Kevin Cruise and Olivia Archbold won’t be joining us in the final, we bid farewell to one half of the semi finalists.

And we warn you: if next time you vote posh-kid neuron-killers The Arrangement through (violinist: Lara Le Cort De Billo), then we will be round your door with a mobile generator and a dangerously ill-connected power cable to show you just how easy it is to replicate their lead singer’s silly dance.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter