In Susan Boyle, Simon Cowell has created a monster. No, that’s unfair – Susan Boyle’s ancestral DNA created a monster.

But we digress. Thanks to the YouTube video of her Britain’s Got Talent audition, Susan Boyle is the most famous woman in the world. True, most of her YouTube viewers were possibly using the video as a twisted test of endurance – like 2 Girls 1 Cup but with an obviously much worse soundtrack – but, again, we digress.

Anyway, Susan Boyle probably thinks that she’s got Britain’s Got Talent all sewn up now. But not if Simon Cowell’s got anything to do with it.

In many ways the runaway success of Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent audition is both a blessing and a curse. One plus side Susan Boyle has taught all unconventional-looking performers that they can too can be a success, but only if they Forrest Gump’s hairy auntie. Another plus side is that it’s almost guaranteed that Susan Boyle will be given a record deal regardless of where she comes on Britain’s Got Talent, meaning that the Singers Who Look Like Infected Wounds section of HMV will no longer only be full of Paul Potts and The Best Of Simply Red CDs.

But a downside to the Susan Boyle phenomenon is that it’s now become unmanageable. Between the hundreds of millions of YouTube hits she’s received and the reams of glowing newspaper coverage she’s got from columnists who suddenly think they’re masters of sensitivity because they didn’t spray their TV sets with pint after pint of boiling hot vomit the instant she stumbled onscreen, the Susan Boyle backlash was always going to be inevitable.

We just weren’t expecting it from Simon Cowell, that’s all.

Who knows when Susan Boyle started to irritate Simon Cowell. It could have been the moment that she legitimately became bigger than Britain’s Got Talent. It could have been when she let fame go to her head enough to have a makeover despite the fact that people only liked her because she looked like a pube tumour trapped in a fairground hall of mirrors. Or it could have been when she turned down Simon Cowell’s idea to secure the pity vote even further by making her talk in grunts like a caveman and refer to herself in the third person as ‘Soo-soo’. If that even happened.

But whatever the cause, Simon Cowell seems a lot less infatuated with Susan Boyle than he did a few weeks ago. Reuters reports:

“She has got to sing better than she sang before with all those expectations on her. But it could all go horribly wrong for her because there are so many other distractions,” Cowell told TV reporters. “Get yourself together sweetheart for the big one — the semi-final. Shut the door, choose the right song and come back as who you are, not who you want to be.”

We have to admit that Simon Cowell has got a point here. The Britain’s Got Talent semi-final is going to be the biggest night of Susan Boyle’s life, and she needs to focus. After all, she’s going to have an uphill battle if she wants to do better than 400 identical street-dance groups and a dog that can bark the national anthem.

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