HE spent Christmas recovering from coronavirus in isolation just weeks after he returned to the talent show where he made his name.

Suffice to say that 2020 was as much of a bizarre year for George Sampson as anyone else.

It gets stranger still because the Britain’s Got Talent break dancing champ, who grew up in Birchwood, told his 196,000 followers on Twitter that he had Covid-19 – after being mistaken for The Masked Singer.

George said: “It’s good for people to know that they’re not in this pandemic alone and it affects everybody.

“The virus is not picking and choosing who it infects so I thought I may as well show my face and tell people I’m isolating.

“I’d rather just be honest so I thought that was the best thing to do – just get it out.”

George was in London with his girlfriend Kazmin at the time as he had recently filmed the Britain’s Got Talent Christmas special.

He often gets invited back for specials after becoming the youngest person to win the show back in 2008, at the age of 14.

He added: “I started getting symptoms so I thought it was best to get a test and, of course, if you’re doing that you have to isolate and they advised me to stay where I was.”

George also wanted readers to know that, despite being a young man at 27, the virus took its toll on him.

He said: “I was ill. I didn’t have a cough or a tight chest or anything like that but I had headaches, I couldn’t sleep and my body was aching everywhere.”

Now fully recovered and back in Warrington, George is pinning his hopes on rescheduled dates for the tour of the hit musical, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, from April onwards.

It was at the beginning of 2020 that George started work on the show before the world turned upside down. He plays Dean in the story of a teenager who overcomes prejudice to become a drag queen.

George, who now lives with Chapelford with his aunt, added: “We rehearsed in January, we started the tour in February and we got about three weeks in.

“We opened in Sheffield and did Northampton and Edinburgh.

“Then we went to Birmingham and it was an hour before the first show was due to start that the producers came in and said: ‘We’re not continuing until we know what’s going on’. We’ve been closed since.

“At the time I was in a lucky position because I’d just sold my house and so had a lot of savings.

“I was more gutted for the rest of the cast. For a lot of them, it was their first job in a big show. It was make or break and it was taken away from them.

“I was going to get into property and build a back-up plan in case performing didn’t work out in the future. That’s taken a back step now because I’ve had to spend my savings over the past year so it has been a bit rough.

“The thing is I can’t be upset and can’t be down about it because there are people suffering much worse than me.

“So I’ve just been focusing on keeping my head and helping others where I can. We are lucky that the Jamie show was such a big hit so it will come back.

Warrington Guardian: George at Britain’s Got Talent 2019George at Britain’s Got Talent 2019

“We’ve got dates already that are selling out. Hopefully by that point a lot of people will have had their vaccine and we can all crack on again.”

It is hard to imagine hundreds of people watching a show at the moment though – and that is weighing on George’s mind.

The former Birchwood High student, who also saw a Christmas panto he was due to perform at in Newcastle, cancelled said: “The real worry now is whether people will feel safe going to the theatre.

“But I think ultimately that will get outshined by people wanting to get back out and do social things again. I’m hoping there will be a big boom for it.”

In the meantime, it is a waiting game for George. He is an avid gamer and that has been keeping him sane during the various lockdowns and tiered restrictions.

He added: “This is the scariest time I’ve had since winning the show – it’s the uncertainty.

“For anyone in government having to make these decisions it is tough but people are suffering.

“All this stuff came out about retraining but it’s not as easy as that. I left school for this and a lot of these people went to specialist colleges purposely built for performing arts.

“It’s not like they have degrees in other subjects to fall back on

“You can’t take on a new trade in a year and, even in that brief time when the pubs and places were open again, how were performers supposed to get a job when everyone else was trying to get a job who was cut short?”

In these dark times, returning to Britain’s Got Talent brought a smile back to George’s face though and he hopes it did the same for others.

He said: “Hopefully it brought people a bit of joy over Christmas.

“That’s why we did it. No one was paid to do it. We just thought it’d be a good idea to end 2020 by giving something back and all the winners agreed to do it. I’m glad I did it.

“The best part of doing those shows is just being backstage with all the other acts and hearing stories about what they’ve been up to over the years and exchanging tales of who we’ve met along the way. That’s the best bit – and seeing old friends. I’m really close friends with Lagi and Demi, from Stavros Flatley, even though they beat me in the Champions show.

“I just spent my whole time with them and the Diversity boys as we all go way back. We all toured together in 2009. It’s a nice little catch up and the performance itself is the cherry on the cake.”

In the meantime, George is gutted that Britain’s Got Talent 2021 has been postponed amid the pandemic.

He added: “I think it’s going to be such a shame. We are a nation that loves to sit around the telly on a Saturday night.

“We love watching these talent shows with a takeaway. It’s part of British culture and 2020 hammered a hole into that when everything was shut down. So to see a big part of Saturday night TV postponed, and potentially cancelled, is sad.”