Britain’s Got Talent winner Axel Blake has defended his victory on the show after viewers discovered he already had a comedy special on Amazon Prime.
Axel was chosen as the public’s favourite during Sunday night’s final after his stand-up routine earned him almost 20% of viewers’ votes.
He bagged a cash prize of £250,000 and a spot on this year’s Royal Variety Performance.
During a follow-up appearance on Lorraine, the host addressed the fact that some viewers had raised his past TV successes.
“You know what it’s like, people will say, ‘hang on a minute, Britain’s Got Talent is about undiscovered talent’,” Lorraine said.
Axel explained that he had actually financed his Amazon Prime show himself.
“I put my money where my mouth is,” he said. “So it looks like ‘Oh wow, Amazon Prime’ but it doesn’t look like that on the back end. It was a lot of stress.
“I had to borrow from other people, I had already put the deposit down, and after that, Amazon picked it up. So it wasn’t [made] for Amazon Prime. Amazon picked it up.”
He continued: “I recorded it, then Amazon was like, ‘Oh we want that’ and that was like a year later.”
Axel, from West London, hadn’t given up his day job and still worked as a property maintenance manager when he recorded the Prime special. He also had presenting jobs on SBTV and UNILAD.
Speaking after his win on Sunday, Axel said: “Words can’t even explain. I am shaking. Thank you everyone for voting for me. It means the world to me.”
Following his performance, David Walliams said it was a “winning performance”, and that Axel would “storm” the Royal Variety Performance, while Simon Cowell insisted: “I really believe that we have discovered a star.”
Watch his winning routine for yourself below...