Simon Cowell sees the red aerial silks and has his doubts. By the time Paul has taken his wheelchair high above the stage, put on a blindfold and dropped into an inverted spin, Cowell has changed his mind. He reaches for the Golden Buzzer.
That reversal is one of the strongest moments in Britain’s Got Talent 2026: Top 10 BEST Auditions So Far! Across just over an hour, performers give the judges plenty to reconsider. A 16-year-old makes playing cards into a Journey melody. Acrobats support each other with a mouth-held ring. A woman spins a flaming table with her feet. Yet some of the biggest responses come when someone stands still and sings.
A teenager makes the judges play along
Rafferty Coop arrives with his whole family cheering him on. He is 16 and six foot four, which gets the panel talking about his usefulness around high shelves. Asked whether he can win, he replies, “I mean, I would like to hope so.” He sounds less certain about that than about the two things he has come to share: music and magic.
At the judges’ desk, he builds his routine around the idea of making sound visible. He turns a glass upside down over a candy wrapper on Simon’s hand. Later, a chocolate bar appears to pass through solid glass. These are close-up effects performed within reach of the people he needs to convince.
Then Rafferty hands KSI a deck of cards. KSI cuts it and deals several cards onto the table. Rafferty connects their values to labelled piano keys and asks him to read them aloud. Ace, three, five, eight, ten, queen, ten. At first, they sound like an exercise. As Rafferty plays, the judges recognise Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
He has saved another reveal. KSI turns over the cards, whose backs spell BELIEVE. The song and the trick arrive at the same word. KSI climbs onto the judges’ desk and stamps on the Golden Buzzer, then runs up to embrace Rafferty under falling confetti. The boy who hesitated over whether he could win now has a judge celebrating beside him.
Strength measured in smaller points of contact
Rafiki, from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, approach the question of winning with a more practical answer. Their first aim is to reach the final; the judges can ask again when they get there. The group then strip off their shirts and begin a routine built on balance, strength and trust.
Two acrobats hold an inverted head-to-head balance on a small chair structure. Later, one supports another performer in a split handstand using a ring held in the mouth. The mouth-held balance leaves a judge saying, “I’ve never seen it done using your mouth.” The panel reward Rafiki with four yeses.
Paul, who has travelled from Sydney and tells the judges he has a wife and three children, brings a different kind of aerial act. He jokes that the stopover in Abu Dhabi was too painful for him to do anything except win. He also promises to have the audience “rocking their pants off.”
He straps his wheelchair to red silks and rises above the stage. An assistant ties a blindfold around his eyes while he is in the air. Paul continues, eventually spinning upside down while holding the silks. The blindfold comes after the judges have already watched him perform at height; he adds another demand before they have finished absorbing the first.
Cowell admits that he was never much of a fan of silks. “I’ve now changed my mind,” he says. His Golden Buzzer follows. Afterwards, Paul explains what that approval means to him: “Simon’s been around for so long. He’s seen so much, and to have him give me the golden buzzer was just a dream come true.”
The audience supplies the material
Daniel Delby, 38, and MacShane, 34, arrive from Perth, Western Australia, after what they describe as 30 hours of travel. Their preparation has a deliberate limit. They freestyle rap, so they need the people in the room to give them material they have not seen.
Audience members hold up shoes, bags and plush toys. Amanda Holden raises a black wrestling belt above her head. The pair turn what they spot into rhymes, working an oven glove, a passport, Air Max trainers and Alesha’s toothpick into the performance. When a judge offers to show an object early, they stop the reveal. The uncertainty is part of the act.
They also question the panel. Asked for the most famous person in his phone, Simon answers “James Bond.” They immediately reach for a 007 rhyme. KSI praises their freestyle ability, and the panel send them through. Their speed is easier to appreciate when the audience has seen the object only a moment before hearing the line.
The Glasgow mentalist takes participation in a quieter direction. He speaks about living with albinism and about his mother, who saw him differently from the people who stopped and stared. Then he asks Simon to recall a childhood memory and think of a name associated with it, choosing someone “nobody could know.”
Simon gives the first letter, W. The performer goes on to ask him to think of an object connected to that memory. Later, Simon unfolds his handwritten paper to confirm the word “bicycle.” The suspense rests on a private detail rather than a large prop. The viewer waits for Simon’s answer because Simon is the person who can confirm whether the performer has got it right.
Fire, projections and a leap across the desk
Li Wei gives the audience something far less quiet to watch. Lying on her back, she juggles a flaming metal pot with her bare feet. She later spins a blazing wooden table on her feet as sparks erupt around her. The size of the table makes every adjustment visible, while the flames leave little room to look elsewhere.
Another performer works against a projected retro arcade game, appearing inside its two-dimensional world and dodging obstacles. Later, the dancer hovers horizontally in front of the screen, mimicking the driver of a futuristic supercar. The illusion depends on the body and the projected action staying together. A movement that would look strange on an empty stage becomes readable within the game.
Alesha Dixon’s response is physical too. She dives across the judges’ desk, over Amanda, to hit the Golden Buzzer. The judges later review her leap in slow motion. Alongside KSI’s stomp, it is a second occasion when a judge abandons the usual seated response and turns the desk into part of the show.
The singers bring the room back to a voice
Between the larger physical routines, Niamh plucks a harp and sings beneath the stage spotlights. Finley begins singing with a deep, soulful voice that visibly startles the judges. Both give the audience time to listen after performances that demand close attention to objects, screens and bodies in motion.
Shani Wallis, aged 92, sings beside a grand piano with her arms open. By the end, the panel and the auditorium are on their feet. Her performance supplies a different measure of stage presence from the aerial spins and flaming props. She holds the room through her voice and delivery.
Watch the full video to follow these auditions beyond their biggest reveals. Hear Rafferty turn card values into a recognisable tune, watch Paul continue after the blindfold goes on, and stay for Wallis’s performance beside the piano. The introductions and the judges’ responses give each act room to show how it earned that applause.