I found this nugget in the gossip column of 'Entertainment Now - The Insider's Guide To Variety, Cabaret and Misplaced Ambition'.

'Quit your hissing and booing because it's official - Cowell is a soft-boiled patsy after all, not the hard-boiled pro he pretends to be.

Having swapped the Britain's Got Talent green room for the nearest saloon bar, 49 year-old Romanian midget vocal performer, Anastasia Shchukina, told all over a treble Drambuie and a cigar nearly as long as she is.

"With his swarthy looks, glaring eyes, high waistlines and penchant for ladies of the ample persuasion, everyone thinks he's the how-you-say pimp-daddy hard-man of the forgettable musak scene," she told me in a husky slavic accent direct from central casting. "But I've performed my routine for real hard men - I was wired up to a sincerity meter at the 1984 Stasi Christmas party, and may your decadent western God help you if you mess up your lines at the Lubyanka karaoke night."

With her elfin looks and dainty stature, Anastasia barely passes for a quarter of her real age. I forgot she was a woman of the world when she burst into heart-rending sobs midway through ordering a Ploughman's Lunch with extra mustard.

"Got you!," she laughed. "That got me into the BGT final and out of some sticky spots over the last few decades."

But shouldn't the public feel cheated, I asked, recalling the moment when Anastasia, a.k.a. ten year-old Holly Steele, burst into tears part-way through her semi-final number?

"Pah," she said, showering me with cracker and pickle, "it's all just emotional pornography really. I've arranged tragic deaths for relatives and carried around a puppy with a broken paw, but that's all so cliched. You don't want to see talent on there, you just want to see damaged people's emotions get shredded so that you can say "aaawwww" now and again. Could I nail that number without blubbing? For sure. Would it have got me into the final? No. I am just providing a service."

Nor does she worry about the authorities catching up with her. "I would just show them the contract - they tell you to make 'em cry and make 'em dial by any means possible - it's all pounds, roubles and zlotys, baby."

Interview over, Anastasia was Holly again, chewing parma violets and daintily cuddling up to her on-stage mother, in reality a KGB-trained minder ten years her junior. With a pirouette and a curtsy, she was on her way to Heathrow, next stop 'Bolivia Tiene Talento'.

"My Spanish sucks," she confided with a wink. "But everyone understands tears."