Is this parental pride – or are my children actually talented?

We’ve all laughed at parents convinced their sons and daughters are possessed by a talent they don’t actuallly have... but is it ever possible to stay objective about one’s offspring, asks Will Gore

Doesn’t every mother or father run the risk of mistaking unconditional love for their child with a totally misguided belief in their offspring’s genius? (Getty Images)

Parental pride can be a dangerous thing.

We all remember those episodes of The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and the like, when Ellie from Lincolnshire arrives with her doting mum and dad, convinced this will be the beginning of a remarkable career.

“She’s been singing since she was three,” confides mum, apparently unaware that all toddlers warble along to the CBeebies bedtime song.

“Our Ellie’s got the voice of an angel,” adds dad, choking back sobs. “An absolute, genuine angel.”

As a viewer, you normally know something’s afoot by now. Ellie is either going to be the next Whitney, or it’s going to be a case of “Houston, we have a problem.”

Sure enough, as the adoring parents look on through the swing doors, their dear daughter opens her vocal cords and emits a sound that is somewhere between vocoder-era Ozzy Osborne and a bat having its head bitten off.

Tears of ecstatic joy roll down mum and dad’s faces, so spellbound are they by Ellie’s “talent”. Tears of laughter pour down Simon Cowell’s cheeks, while an aghast Cheryl mutters something about the performance being “absolute toilet, man!” Only Louis Walsh thinks it’s good – “you remind me of a young Dame Edna; I’ll give you a yes!” It all ends with a near ruckus and an angry exit through a fire escape, as Ellie and her folks vow to prove Simon wrong.

We can all laugh at the tragic blindness of Ellie’s parents to her manifest lack of ability, but doesn’t every mother or father run the risk of mistaking unconditional love for their child with a totally misguided belief in their offspring’s genius?

All this has been on my mind after I went to watch my daughter in her school play last week – an esoteric, musical interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we’d encouraged her to get involved in. After all, we reasoned, she’d been going to a musical theatre club outside school for years, so it seemed a shame not to take part in a similar activity within school hours.

We didn’t have any particular expectations. At 14, our eldest child has long enjoyed singing and acting, but had rarely got big roles in the past. When she told us she had got the part of “Janet the Tree”, we wondered if she actually had any lines at all. Still, we felt proud that she’d put herself forward alongside kids much older than herself, and we knew she’d give it her best shot.

As show week approached and anxiety levels grew, we helped with script read-throughs, bemused to discover that Janet not only had quite a lot of lines, but a couple of singing solos to boot. I began to worry too.

I needn’t have done so. On the appointed evening, we took our seats in the small-town theatre and, with bated breath, discovered that our daughter was, well, actually very good. In green and brown, she inhabited Janet with suitable arboreal spirit, turning out to be the play’s primary comic turn. She had been instructed to adopt a cockney drawl, and it put Dick Van Dyke to shame. The lines were delivered with confidence and panache; the singing was tuneful; she moved around the stage like she meant it. And she took her curtain call with other main cast members to applause and whoops (the latter from me).

I had been proud of my daughter a million times, but last week I felt something different – I was impressed. And not in a smug way, or at least I don’t think so. Rather, I was impressed in a way that surprised me, because I realised there was a level of talent that had previously been unknown to me.

But then I wondered, was I just being like Ellie’s father? Was this how parental blindness started, with a better-than-expected school play? Maybe Ellie had once been a singing tree too, convincing her mama and papa that stardom beckoned.

I thought back to my daughter’s earlier performances, like the time when, as a 7-year-old, she composed an up-tempo number called Devil from Hell, which she then sang to us in the living room. We were certainly stunned, but perhaps we should have recognised a future number one and contacted Sony to try and bag a record deal.

So, am I just another Ellie’s dad? There’s only one way to find out. Britain’s Got Talent, here we come! And if it’s a “no” from Simon, I will kick some serious arse.