Here it is, then. Enough of the freaks, losers and oddbods. Time now for the, you know, perfectly normal talented folk.

LOL, whatever! It’s the AGT quarter-finals. In Vegas, baby!

Las Vegas: home to sexually-desperate bachelor parties, the nasty ladies who satisfy their carnal needs and, now, 40 of America’s most talented groups of people to… entertain them? That doesn’t seem quite right. Ah, yes: to send them running and screaming back to Asswipe, Montana while gibbering about singing seniors, precocious juniors, and English talent judges who speak only the language known as “Dribble“.

More details about the whole painful mess of post-auditions week after this little jump.

Approximately two thousand of the nationwide auditions’ best/most-comically-deluded acts made it to the point where they could still be cruelly thrown from the competition without being allowed to reprise their gay homage to David Schwimmer from Friends. And yet, only 40 of them could proceed to the real finals in California. So, how best to begin the whittling process? Hmm…

Oh, but of course: by flying them all to Las Vegas, standing them in an airport hangar like a flock of dispirited sheep set for slaughter, then dressing David Hasselhoff up as a 1980s Miami pimp and asking him to deliver the news to the painfully self-deceiving wannabes.

First to be cut were acts including The Fifty Kids In Ginger Wigs For Some Reason, The Boy Who Plays Guitar Better Than Someone His Age Should (have they thought this through?) and Kari Callin (now hang on, this was supposed to be the next Susan Boyle! What the hell are they doing?).

We have no idea what they can possibly bring into the finals to top the bilaterally-hairlipped chanteuse, but this is fact: YOU CRAZY MORONS! How the hell can you take away the most mutant wannabe celebrifreak you have, and then expect us to write amusingly scoffing words about what’s left? Are you crazy in a bad way?

Well, let’s look at who’s through. Possibly.

Although childishly disjointed editing made us begin to lose track of what was real and what was merely the effect of the calming hallucinogens we take each week to make it through the show. Anyway:

Recycled Percussion: blokes who use ladders as drums. Twice as bad – plus a thousand percent – as it sounds. Sharon Osbourne made some water  from her eyes at them (presumably in an attempt to look more like an actual human and less like the Terminator’s mother) and they got through.

Kevin Skinner: Chicken catcher from Mayfield, Kentucky. We should probably repeat that: he’s a chicken catcher from Mayfield, Kentucky.

Chuckle.

But, though he looks like the offspring of Toby Keith and a pile of dead leaves, he sings like the offspring of Toby Keith and a jar of honey. He’s set to go far, so long as they can get Alabama hooked up to the telephone network before voting begins.

The Comic Bots: some kind of dancing act in professionally-elaborate robot suits?

Look, we have never been allowed to see these guys do their thing, and tonight their fate was kind of ambiguously hinted at but never actually expressed.

So are they through? Are they any good? Should we be stacking our weekly allowance from the girlfriend on them?

Not a clue. All we know is we want to see these boys/girls/actual robots shaking their titanium asses to some funk ASAP. Do you hear us, Hasselhoff? ASAP.

We will see you when the real stuff starts: it’s going to be so awesome!*

*Won’t be at all awesome.

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Some things haven’t changed from the British version of Got Talent.

There’s the smug judge on the right, the facially inarticulate judge in the middle, and Piers Morgan on the left (still desperately trying to make comprehensible words come out of his slimy, floppy-jawed mouth).

And now America’s got Talent strikes another BGT-like chord: last night, an aesthetically displeasing lady with terrible hair lumbered onto the stage and sang a song a bit better than you’d thought she would.

They’re obviously nicking all our ideas. Which is depressing, as it means that fifteen dancing twatpuppets will win the thing.

Well, at least the the journey there should be lots of hilarious funnery a dispiriting blend of pretentious ten-year-olds trying to avoid an after-show parental beating, and hallucinating pensioners trying to avoid peeing onstage.

Let’s see what AGT gave us this week:

Most Unsurprising To Be Thrown Off: Reality, from Memphis. Three girls who believe that they are attractive and two boys who believe themselves to be heterosexual.

Art students who performed a showtune with all the melodic harmony and showbiz pizazz of Sylvester Stallone singing a Leonard Cohen song while stoned.

Quite rightly booed from the stage. Quite wrongly not packed into a crate and delivered to the nearest abattoir.

Most Safely Dangerous Act: If you’re going to do an act with fire, we need it to be something with the potential for dreadful self-harm: swallow flaming petroleum, set your hair on fire, or stick red-hot needles up your urethra. Something that makes us go “Wow, they are either an incredibly resilient human being, or else a terrible dumpsplash of a person who would shove red-hot needles up their urethra in order to be on the telly for eleven seconds“.

Point being, a fire act should not consist of you trying to keep a broomstick with a candle on each end as far away from your body as you can by holding it in the air on your feet. On these criteria – and the fact that he looks like a just-outed-himself-and-going-overboard-with-the-gay-thing David Schwimmer – we declare Simon Chaban to be the losingest winner.

Most Susan Boyley Performance: Remember when Susan first trundled onto the BGT stage, hair swaying like a pube helmet and hips swinging like a gorilla in a dress trying to make a casual entrance into a meeting of Anorexics Anonymous?

We do. We dream of it. Dreams in which a beefy-wristed Scotswoman twists our limbs into uncomfortable, yet oddly enjoyable, positions.

Anyway, you know the story: unattractive lady comes on, sings a show tune okay, it gets disguised for broadcast with some dubbed audience noise, and YouTube melts as a trillion overweight American ladies try to embed the video in their emails.

Yet those bloody Yanks had to go one better, didn’t they? Not-pretty lady? Check. Backstory involving rejection of singing based on physical appearance? Check. Hair that would shame a hermit? Check. Showtune sung badly? Check. Bilateral cleft palate? Che…Wait a minute, what?

Oh, yes. Not content with merely repeating the Boyle template, America has added medically genuine physical defects to the mix. Kari Callin, a radiology technician from Seattle, last night stepped up to the plate and delivered a performance likely to generate YouTube viewings in the hundreds of… well, just hundreds probably.

But still: the torch passes. And long may you carry it, straggly-haired and easy-target-of-fun Kari Callan. For where would hecklerspray be without a hilariously ugly talent contestant to mock?

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