Will the producers of America’s Got Talent be able to find a mad-haired old fat lady, just like the Brits did? The clue is in the question: what with this being America, they’ll doubtless be fighting them off with sticks.

Of course, America has to do things a bit bigger than anybody else. So we fully expect their version of Susan Boyle to be a 1o00lb monster with hair like a mammoth’s pubes, who has to be poured onto the stage from the back of a dump truck.

Join us after the jump, when we look at how the show’s first week went.

The format of the show is the same as Britain’s Got Talent: a bunch of wildly-deluded ordinary Joes and Janes wander onto the stage and, in front of a real audience, perform their ‘act’. Just as in BGT, most of these people and their ‘acts’ come in four categories:

1) Senior citizens doing inadvisably energetic things. Which often involve sequins, Swedish balls and a total lack of dignity. These ageing funsters don’t tend to get through the auditions, being shunted straight back home to their weak tea, afternoon naps, and fading memories of hitting the big time.

2) Young people with tattoos doing painful things. Usually consists of an ugly young man with a pierced nose and his female assistant who looks kind of hot until the camera gets too close to her face. Opening week had Sky and Vlad Eros, who didn’t even get to show us Vlad punching a carriage bolt through his cock, or whatever he was going to do, as Sky’s hair immediately and hilariously caught fire on a stage prop.

3) Tediously similar groups of kids doing wacky dances. Public of Britain, you disgust us. Given the choice of Susan Boyle and Diversity, you went with the loose-limbed kids instead of the wobbly-bottomed spinster. Let us hope that the people of America are slightly more discerning, and realise that frizzy-haired old virgins are much funnier and easier to write about than a meeting of the Epileptic Parkinsons’ Patients Support Group.

4) People with a voice and a  “backstory”. Think Danny Gokey from this year’s American Idol. These are the folks who have come to the auditions smelling of petrol and telling the sad story of their entire family’s recent demise in a housefire. If they get to air, you can be sure there’s a decent voice to justify your vote, and here it was The Voices Of Glory: three kids with a genuinely horrific tale, who sang God Bless America. Tragedy and patriotism? They’ll go far this year.

So, this season’s AGT looks set to tick all the right boxes: normal people, odd people, talented people, pensioners who play the guitar and harmonica while riding a unicycle. It’s all there.

At the moment, our money’s on the inspirationally surreal Comic Bots. However, as NBC only showed a few seconds of the breakdancing transformers, here’s the quite wonderful David Johnson:

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