Simon, the pop music mogul, said: “I don’t have any talent. I say that because I had no qualifications – I left school at 16 and I wasn’t good at school. Once I realized I was talentless, that I wanted to do something fun [that] it had to be either television, music, or films, and I ended up in music publishing. That’s when I decided after a year or so I wanted to sign artists.”
He said: “Got talent was dead in the water. No one wanted the show. We made a pilot – it was the worst I’ve ever made. It was so bad we went from 90 minutes to 7 minutes. It was that bad. It was just horrible. It just didn’t work. But there was enough for me to go on.
“I still believed in it. So, from the idea, to actually having it here, that took about three or four years.” He said: “Once I started to make some money, I bought a Porsche, bought a house. By the time I was 28, I was broke and I had to go back and live with my parents.
“What it taught me was that I was rushing. I wanted everything to happen overnight. If you’re not born with a talent, you learn, you watch, you listen, and then you learn from your mistakes and your successes.”
After his ups and downs, Simon said that he started therapy in a bid to process it. He revealed: “I started to see a therapist a year ago. I wish I’d done it 20 years ago because this is a very stressful business.”