Cancel the Priory - Susan needs the folks back home

This shy, fragile woman is on the verge of a breakdown precisely because Cowell has plucked her from comfortable obscurity and transported her to a world she can't deal with.

The more they primp the fluffy towels, the more Cucumber and Jojoba Morning Sunrise Moisturiser they rub into her eyelids, the more destabilised she'll become.

Cowell's brilliant selection machine picked the wrong patsy. They wanted a gleeful simpleton, grateful for every diamond-edged crumb that fell from the celebrity table. Instead, they got someone used to the decent standards of Pebbles, her cat; when she entered the amoral world of commercial telly, she lashed out, threatened to quit and threw water over a studio manager. And who can blame her?

The best thing would be to return to her beige, pebble-dashed, semi-detached house in Blackburn, West Lothian, close the gate to her garden with its trim privet hedge and freshly creosoted picket fence, and never appear on television again.

Blackburn, I discovered on a recent trip, provides the support structure — familiar surroundings, familiar people, an extended family — that we all need to maintain mental security.

How much more you need that structure if you're vulnerable. You can't rely on the kindness of strangers — particularly when those strangers sniff money in your vulnerability.

Blackburn is one of the small towns threaded like onions on a string along the M8 from Edinburgh to Glasgow. The motorway thunders through the north of the town; to the south it is hemmed in by the busy A705. A big coal and cotton town from the late 18th century onwards, it expanded further in 1960, when the British Motor Company built a truck and tractor factory in nearby Bathgate.

Then everything stopped. The two pits closed in 1968 and 1972. In 1986, the truck factory shut down. Blackburn now shows all the classic symptoms of rapid industrialisation and even quicker de-industrialisation.

The poster outside the Mill shopping centre is advertising 15 cans of 440ml Tennent's for £9.99. In the Happy Valley Hotel, where Susan Boyle sang karaoke by the pool table, sipping half a lemonade, middle-aged men are on their third pint of Stella on a weekday lunchtime. None looks like going to work as three o'clock approaches.

On the street outside Susan Boyle's house, a young mother in a lurid pink babygro tracksuit wheels her pram past a clutch of paparazzi. A plump woman of about 45 limps up Bathgate Road, leaning heavily on a stick.

And yet, the men in the Happy Valley are deeply protective about Susan Boyle. One, Sid Mason, who used to work behind the bar, is particularly angry with the girl in the audience who ridiculed her in the first show. "Oh, if I could get hold of her, I'd " he says, restraining himself, "We're all 100 per cent behind Susan and we just want her to be happy."

That was the constant response I got; either that or a polite refusal to disturb her privacy. I myself eventually got round to disturbing her privacy, tracking her down as she was just about to enter her house. Flustered and red-faced, she had been repackaged in high heels, black skirt and tights, and a tight-fitting checked jacket. Her live-in minder brushed me away but he couldn't keep her from the two men in high-visibility vests on her doorstep. "Oh, are you the gasmen?" she giggled, "Don't break the door down."

Wisecracking all the way, she rushed past her minder, me and the paparazzi, desperate to get home to Pebbles — and a sense of security.