14 DAY TRIAL // On the season finale of Britain’s Got Talent, judge and music mogul Simon Cowell had the surprise of a lifetime when, in the middle of a performance, he was pelted with eggs. The perpetrator turned out to be violist Natalie Holt – so, could this have been just a PR stunt meant to boost her public profile?
It certainly seems so, voices online are saying, as reported by the Daily Mail.
As we also reported yesterday, Holt was on BGT as well, the previous season, but never made it to the live shows. The initial assumption was that she was a sore loser and thought pelting Cowell and the other judges with eggs would make her feel better.
She tells the Daily Mail that she was actually trying to protest against Cowell’s monopoly on the music industry, but viewers at home believe she may have had a more practical reason for doing what she did: she was just looking for some extra publicity.
“She was accused of targeting the music mogul during Saturday’s show as part of a publicity stunt to raise her profile,” the British publication writes.
“Millions of viewers saw the 30-year-old musician, a Bafta-nominated composer, walk to the front of the stage carrying a box of eggs, as singers Richard and Adam were performing,” the Mail adds.
As the video below shows, Holt was actually performing with the band – and this is how she managed to get on stage during the opera number.
However, she insists that the egging was an unspontaneous form of protest because she’d been asked to mime playing her instrument for the cameras.
“I took a stand against people miming on television and against Simon Cowell and against his influence on the music industry,” she says for the same media outlet.
A rep for BGT notes that this is standard practice “for backing musicians during TV performances as it isn’t possible to easily capture the quality of the sound in a live broadcast environment. All contestants on Britain’s Got Talent sing live.”
