PM meets Britain's Got Talent winner

Gordon Brown has welcomed Britain's Got Talent winner Paul Potts to Number 10 and thanked him for being a "great ambassador for the country".

Read the transcript for the film below:

Simon Cowell:

The most famous door in the world.

Gordon Brown:

Paul, come in. Great to see you. Now, come and have a seat here. What do you enjoy most about what you're doing? Is it meeting people? Is it travelling? Is it just the performance, which you seem to enjoy, really? When I see you singing, you enjoy it very much.

Paul Potts:

I think it's a combination of things. I love being able to do what I love doing, and that's a huge privilege for me. But I also enjoy actually meeting the people that actually go out and buy the album, because the way I look at it is that people work for a couple of hours just to buy the album. If you think what the average hourly rate is, people go out and they spend a couple of hours working to go out and buy an album, the least I can do is spend a few minutes with them.

Simon Cowell:

Although they are still good value for money, CDs.

Gordon Brown:

He quickly said. Yours are certainly good value for money. Two million people are saying that. Did you dream of this and think it might not happen or might happen?

Paul Potts:

I used to listen to opera on my iPod and used to imagine while I was sat in the bath, "Could that be you?" And I thought, "No." And especially after having the benign tumour and then as soon as I got back from that, four days afterwards I got knocked off my bike, and, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of everything at that point. And, in the end, it just came down to the toss of a ten pence piece.

Simon Cowell:

He had to flip the coin. "Am I gonna audition? Am I not?" I asked him on the way out, "Was it heads or tails?" "Heads, I audition. Tails, I don't." And it came up heads. Whole life changed around the revolving of a coin.

Gordon Brown:

So you're going to do The World's Got Talent?

Simon Cowell:

That's the idea, yeah.

Gordon Brown:

It's amazing. It's just so powerful.

Simon Cowell:

It's great.

Gordon Brown:

This idea, though, that you can unlock talent and that there's hidden talent, there's potential, and some people are almost waiting for the chance is really quite an important thing.

Simon Cowell:

You said it to me when we discussed it a year ago, we can extend this to sports, science. Britain's Got Talent. It's a great thing.

Gordon Brown:

I would like every school in the country and every community in the country to be asking, "What have we got here?" Look at what you've got. Let's see if we can spot something, discover something, and let's see if we can bring it out. And even if people don't succeed, at least it's challenging them all the time to be better than they are.

Simon Cowell:

Totally agree.

Gordon Brown:

Maybe we should think about how this could become a nationwide search for Britain. It's the only way Britain's going to be successful in the future. The only way a country can be successful now is not by having no skills but by getting all the talents unlocked so that you can actually challenge the Chinese or the Indians or the Americans and be better.

Simon Cowell:

And believe in yourself.

Gordon Brown:

And believe in yourself. That's sometimes what you...

Simon Cowell:

Paul's a good example of that. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Paul Potts:

Thank you.

Gordon Brown:

Absolutely brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Keep doing what you're doing, and keep being a great ambassador for the country. Everywhere you go, you're making a mark for Britain that we're proud of.

Paul Potts:

I just try to do my best.

Gordon Brown:

And you do. You're doing even better than that, so well done.

Simon Cowell:

And thank you once again for sparing us the time. I really do appreciate it.

Gordon Brown:

It's great to have you here.

Photographer:

Thank you very much. Good. And again. Lovely.