Britains Got Talent: We Just Need to Redefine Talent

Scary feeding in today's Times a third of our 6-18 year olds define talent as being able to sing, 10% being good at football, 8% being as dancing with only 1% thinking academic achievement was a talent. They seem to think talent is having the ability to do something that may eventually get you on TV.

What a sorry state we're in if that is what is going to define our young people as they will grow up thinking they do not have any talent but they do. It brings to mind the fate of the Golgafrincham B Ark encountered by Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It contained what were deemed to be the useless third, ie not the money people or the actual workers, of the population in a vain attempt to fit off a population explosion. Amongst their number was a telephone sanitiser not necessarily the most high profile of talents but in the end a vital one that the Golgafrincham's dearly needed as the population, the Guide tells us, was eventually wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

We still need young people with a talent for science to go into research to help join the fight against those virulent diseases out there. Or those who can write to tell us what is happening through journalism or speaking out and making their voices heard to bring about change. Or with an artistic bent not to perform necessarily but to produce, whether that is television, art, architecture to give us something or somewhere to enjoy.

Not all of us can be top class and well played performers. Yes many us can dream and some of us will achieve but none of us will survive if that is all we aim for. We need thinkers and doers as well people who are talented in oh so many way that is what society is about and that is what our talent pool contains. If our young people realise that they can have self esteem knowing that they have a talent/s, which they can then use to the maximum of their ability.

As the biblical parable of the talents tells us each has been given something, some more than others it is how we use the talents we've been given that will bring a reward. If we sit back and don't even use what we have but hanker after the unacheiveable what good are we? Let's wake up, and wake others up that there is far more talent out there than just what the TV audience wants to see.