Winner Paul Potts owes Britain's Got Talent dream to wife

"Julie-Ann knows that if she told me to break a leg I probably would, so she just tells me to have a good time." He's talking about the woman who believed from the moment they first met on a blind date 12 years ago that the insecure, overweight mobile phone salesman had what it took to become a major star.

Potts was, in his own words, "the short tubby bloke with the teeth" who only appeared on the first series of Britain's Got Talent in 2007 after he and Julie-Ann flipped a coin.

At the time the couple, who have now been married for 10 years, were a month away from having their £60,000 terraced home in Port Talbot, South Wales, repossessed. They were also £30,000 in debt.

It was then that Paul saw an advertisement for a new TV contest offering a £100,000 first prize and wondered if this could be their way out of financial catastrophe. "Entering Britain's Got Talent was the final throw of the dice," Paul, 42, recalls. "After that I was quite prepared to abandon my singing ambitions and concentrate on the day job."

But then came the unforgettable moment when the would-be opera singer shuffled on to the stage of Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre in a cheap suit and with front teeth very clearly in need of major dental intervention and sang Nessun Dorma as if his life depended on it (which in a very real sense it did). He reduced judge Amanda Holden to tears and received a standing ovation.

That life-changing clip has been viewed on YouTube approximately 115 million times. It's a figure that means that more people have seen Paul sing the passionate aria by Puccini than witnessed it being performed by his idol Pavarotti, who had been most closely associated with it.

And it only happened because Julie-Ann, whom he calls "Julz" and who is 10 years his junior, encouraged him to pursue his dream.

Source: Express