Jon Courtenay has said that winning Britain’s Got Talent couldn’t have come at a better time as he was beginning to drown in debt from the Covid-19 lockdown.
The 47-year-old singing comedian pocketed a cool £250,000 for winning the ITV show, scooping a huge percentage of the votes with a landslide victory.
Jon had been writing his own songs and working on cruise ships before the coronavirus pandemic left him out of work and short on cash.
Jon told The Mirror that they have “no savings” and that when he was working he wasn’t “earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.”
With his wife Emma, 44, a stay-at-home mum, the family found themselves in a “tough situation” with Jon unable to work.
With sons Nathan. 15, and Alfie, nine, at home, Jon decided to change his act from being a magician to a comic singer and it has paid dividends.
He has become the first golden buzzer act to win the series, after Ant and Dec sent him through as their choice and he is going to use his windfall to pay off the overdraft and also Jon said he has “friends and family that I can help out.”
Jon is now waiting for the pandemic restrictions to be eased so that he can get out there and capitalise on winning BGT.
For the moment, who will continue with his “normal job outside of the entertainment business” but he said that he has a good feeling about his future as when he got the golden buzzer he “knew I was going to be OK as I’d had that exposure.”
The pandemic meant that BGT was suspended for a number of months but this didn’t help Jon as much it might seem, as he had too much time for his creative mind to manage.
He said that he works best “under pressure” and with six months to kill, he started to “overthink it and rewrite it” when it came to his final act.
In beating choir Sign Along With Us and variety performer Steve Royle to the top prize, Jon said that it got his friends and neighbours out to celebrate, saying: “The entire street came out of their houses, into the street and were cheering.”