Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Fish out of water: Susan Boyle & you

Labels can be limiting, but they can also be freeing.

Boyle: A discovery set her on a path to overcoming fears. (Photo by Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)
Boyle: A discovery set her on a path to overcoming fears. (Photo by Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)Read moreGetty Images

* SUSAN BOYLE: HER SECRET STRUGGLE. 10 tonight, Ovation.

* YOUR INNER FISH. 10 tonight, WHYY12.

LABELS CAN BE limiting, but they can also be freeing.

It's worked that way, at least, for Susan Boyle, the Scottish singer whose appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" - five years ago this week - made her an international sensation via YouTube.

Her attempt to overcome crippling stage fright to add live performances to a successful recording career is the subject of "Susan Boyle: Her Secret Struggle," a documentary making its U.S. premiere on Ovation tonight.

Like most fairy tales, Boyle's overnight success had a dark side, and the spotlight trained on her in the days and weeks following her audition caught some erratic behavior and led to reports that the singer had suffered from oxygen deprivation at birth that left her brain-damaged.

Last year, Boyle revealed that she'd learned that the stories she herself had believed weren't true, and that she'd since been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum that accounted for her social anxiety.

She may have traded one label for another, but apparently the discovery that she didn't, after all, have a below-average IQ helped Boyle imagine a life that would bring her out of the studio and before live audiences.

The film, which includes an interview with Boyle's psychiatrist, shows her tackling fear a step at a time, starting with learning to sing with live accompaniment rather than a backing track and working up to taking the stage.

For those who thrilled to Boyle's viral performance of "I Dreamed a Dream," her transformation can only add to the inspiration.

"Four years ago we saw her start this journey and now she has arrived," says one fan at Boyle's first solo concert, in Inverness, Scotland. "She is part of every one of us who has been beaten down and beaten down and beaten down, and she's let nobody stop her, and you just have to applaud that."

'Your Inner Fish'

You might want to rethink the menu (and seating) for your next family get-together.

Because PBS wants to introduce you to "the family you never knew you had," and some members may fit around the table more easily than others. A few may even be on the menu.

(I know. Awkward.)

Science programming doesn't get much more entertaining than PBS' "Your Inner Fish," a three-part exploration of our anatomy's ancient origins that begins tonight.

Host Neil Shubin, the ebullient paleobiologist who wrote the book on which the show's based, is a guy who likes to keep moving, whether he's taking viewers fossil hunting along a Pennsylvania highway or visiting a neighbor whose husband wants him to take a look at the tiny hole near her ear left behind by a finny ancestor.

Trips to the Arctic to look for more fossils give Shubin a chance to share his normal-guy trepidation about the still living, breathing wildlife nearby ("everything white becomes a polar bear") and to show how much out-of-the-lab work goes into a discovery that, when it comes, turns out to be pretty exciting.

Inside the lab, it's not dull, either, as we peer into an egg at a chicken embryo while learning how a gene dubbed "sonic hedgehog" helps our hands to form using the same mechanism that give fish their fins and birds their claws.

Subsequent installments will deal with "Your Inner Reptile" (April 16) and "Your Inner Monkey" (April 23), so you might as well throw a couple of extra leaves in the table now.

On Twitter: @elgray

Blog: ph.ly/EllenGray