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Legal
Britain’s Got Talent contestant takes Simon Cowell to employment tribunal
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 10 June 2010
A woman who appeared as a contestant on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ has had a discrimination claim against Simon Cowell, his production company Syco and the show’s co-producers Fremantle Media, which she launched back in January, approved to be heard by an employment tribunal. A pre-hearing review will now take place next month.
Emma Amelia Pearl Czikai, who appeared on the show in 2009, suffers from cervical spine neuritis, which can cause neck and back pain. She claims that the ‘BGT’ production team were aware of her condition and intentionally aggravated it to make a “fool” of her, by ensuring she couldn’t deliver an audition performance up to her usual standards.
Describing her first appearance on the show in May last year, she says: “They put me on at ten o’clock at night. They had me standing outside in that cold snap immediately before I went on stage. That traps the nerves, so immediately that aggravates the condition. It’s almost as if they wanted me to fail”. She adds that her backing track was then too loud, saying: “I’m very particular about the bass. I feel it in my neck and if I get that vibration, it aggravates the condition”.
Czikai claims that under normal conditions her singing is “probably better than anyone else they’ve ever had on the programme”, but that she couldn’t demonstrate that fact because of the way she was treated. She says that after her audition she told the show’s producers that she felt she had been treated unfairly and asked them not to show the footage that had been recorded, in which she was universally panned by the judges. They refused, but offered to have her as a guest on ITV2 spin-off show ‘Britain’s Got More Talent’, where they would make it clear that she had a medical complaint which had led to her performance being below standard. But, she says, this agreement was not met.
Czikali has gone the employment tribunal route because she claims the nature of her relationship with the show’s producers was that of employer/employee, and any clauses in the contract she signed that may have said otherwise are irrelevant because that agreement was void as a result of the TV companies allegedly breaching the law. Or something like that. If Czikai’s claim is successful, the ruling could also have repercussions for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ sister show ‘X-Factor’, where contestants sign similar short-term contracts.
