IN a break with tradition, this year’s Britain’s Got Talent champion wasn’t declared by Ant and Dec, live on ITV, but by the Press several hours before the grand final.

Without leaving any shred  of doubt, the winner would be, they all agreed, professional West End singer Sydnie Christmas.

Sydnie Christmas was the not-so-surprising winner of BGT

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Ant and Dec announce the winner of BGT
News that  deserved neither fanfare nor any spoiler alert because we’d all seen what was going on, by that point, with the running order and half-time entertainment on the five preceding live shows.

For Britain’s Got Talent is a variety show where there is never any variety about the special guest stars.

They’re always singers.

If we’re lucky, they’ll come from a West End show, like Sydnie.  If we’re not, it’ll be Alesha Dixon, but the message remains exactly the same.

A singer MUST win BGT, and if you ever doubted that aim, then it was all but ­confirmed by the news that, just as she had done at her semi-final, Sydnie would be given the final performance slot, which all but guarantees victory.

Before we reached that sorry and inevitable pass, though,  we had to endure the five live heats, where the public were given the responsibility of weeding out the re-treads, ­foreign ringers, bus nutters, sob stories and shape- shifters — like the dog-conga woman, Lucy Heath, who made the 2010 final and 2017 semi — while still producing a decent line-up for the main event.

An impossible task, as it transpired.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that no sooner had they got rid of “dog-conga woman” than she was back as the “unanimous” wildcard choice of the judges, but the more brutal truth was that, along with the British part, the ­talent element of BGT has been one of the two obvious things lacking this year.

There was certainly no one who was going to threaten Cowell’s preferred winner, ­Sydnie, come Sunday night.

Instead, we had: South Korean taekwondo act Ssaulabi ­battering the hell out of some kitchen tiles; an informal chat with  neurodiverse comedian Alex Mitchell; and magician Jack Rhodes, my own favourite act, who ­inadvertently ­provided the highlight of the series when he got Cowell to wear “the hat   of truth”.

A temptation Amanda Holden really should have avoided, but didn’t.

“Can I be on the show for the next two years, with an uplift?” she asked Simon, before remembering to add: “Obviously, with Alesha and Bruno as well?”