Bridgewater Hall, Saturday

When Britain’s Got Talent first aired on television, it’s fair to say it didn’t receive the most glowing reception.

Many critics saw it as the nadir of reality TV contests – by opening the doors for any demented member of the public to demonstrate their ‘talent’ (that term used very loosely), weren’t ITV guilty of enouraging, well, a potential ‘freakshow’?

Naturally, Britain’s Got Talent was always going to encourage its fair share of oddballs (which we laughed at with much merriment), but ultimately, its end goal was sincere – to unearth unique British talent that would otherwise have gone undiscovered.

Enter, then, Paul Potts – the modest mobile phone salesman with the romantic soul and the voice of a Neapolitan opera singer. It’s an unlikely success story, but Potts has an unlikely life story.

Thirty-six-year-old Potts, who hid his talent from his colleagues at Carphone Warehouse, had all but given up on singing for a living – that is, until Britain’s Got Talent came calling and blessed him with a £100,000 cash prize plus a recording contract.

But while it is one thing to entice the public with a personal heartbreak story (and Potts has suffered many life knockbacks), it’s another thing to seduce them with that not too popular of musical genres, opera music.

Quasi-operatic acts like G4 may have commercialised opera music to the masses (or ‘popera,’ as it’s known), but Paul Potts was taking opera music to new levels of technical brilliance.

Labels such as ‘the British Pavarotti’ might be stretching things ever so slightly, but then, any performer who can drag Puccini and Tchaikovsky into the mainstream should be applauded.

Whether Potts can keep his career flourishing outside of the ‘reality TV underdog’ novelty remains to be seen.

But one thing is sure – Britain’s Got Talent has justified its existence by putting British opera stars firmly on the map. Now it’s up to Paul Potts to keep it there.