Britain’s Got Talent star Tom Ball plays Eastbourne hospice charity night

Tom, who grew up in Burgess Hill and lives near Crawley, will be joining special guests Faryl Smith and Ruby Skilbeck on stage for an evening with Bourne Chorus.

Tom came third in this year’s Britain’s Got Talent. And inevitably it’s been quite a year: “It has been absolutely mad and I've loved every minute of it. The first time I started talking about Britain's Got Talent was about September last year. There were a couple of years where I had not sung or performed very much at all. Covid was a massive factor obviously but I just saw an advert one day and I thought why not try. I sent in a video and from there that was that! Things really happened quickly. I went for the first audition in January, and it was just incredible. At that first audition I was incredibly nervous. I was the most nervous I've ever been. Obviously you just didn't know what was going to happen. You watch it on TV and you hear stories and you're thinking what happens if I'm just delusional and I thought I was good but in fact I'm actually really rubbish! So I was just thinking well let's try and see if this goes well and it did go well. It went really really well and it got a bit easier each time especially in the final. I was very very nervous all the way through but not as much as at the first audition. By the time I got to the final I was just there to have a really good time. I didn't feel the pressure that much at that point. The point was that everybody deserved to win. I think it was ten of us in the final and they're all absolutely amazing. Any one of them could have won.”

Inevitably it has changed Toms life, but in good ways: “People stop and talk and I like talking to people and hearing their stories. It is lovely to have those interactions. There have been a couple of interactions that weren't quite so pleasant but it's a tiny percentage! I never thought I'd be in the top three. I just never thought that I’d get that far.”

Since then it has been a question of capitalising on the success: “I'm very lucky. My manager works incredibly hard. I'm performing every single week, in fact more than every single week. It is almost every single day that I'm doing something. I went back and finished my school year to make sure that's the students got the education that they needed and then three days after finishing school I was off to the Barcelona. I was a teacher at a secondary school teaching drama and music and I'm still teaching. I’m going into schools and do assemblies and I've got some very exciting projects coming up to do with teaching but I'm not now the typical nine-to-five teacher. I'd been qualified for about a year but with the training I suppose I was teaching for about two years and I just thought I was going to stay in that profession quite a long while but you just don't know. But the children were lovely. They were incredible. They were so amazing and so supportive. There was no single student was negative about what I was doing.”