DAN Hewitt is nothing if not professional. You could tell by the way he delivered his victory interview while performing his winning song.

"It's a new day. It's a new life. It's a new dawn. And I'm feeling good."

One thing's for sure, if ever you wanted to give fate a helpful nudge, then Nina Simone's classic is the one to choose.

As winner of Stoke's Top Talent, Dan becomes the first boxer to star in panto since Frank Bruno.

Called on to croon again at the end of this mammoth talent search, he performed a momentary spar with an invisible opponent. In the red corner was Dan, in the blue the demon of self-doubt. He had dealt it a knockout blow.

"I can't believe this is happening to me," he told the audience. And, indeed, you could see how much it meant by the way he'd earlier blubbed over Jonathan Wilkes. There were downpours of Biblical proportions both inside and outside.

"You big wuss," Jonathan had told him. "You're supposed to be hard!"

But one suspects Daniel, by day a debt collector, is looking at a new incarnation.

It was tough on second placed Sam Bloor, the Newcastle 12-year-old who delivered Breaking Free with a personality and sparkle that turned up the audience's thermostat ten degrees. As panto producer Kevin Wood pointed out, he had 'star quality'.

Also threatening a right hook to Dan was Joy Sidley-Brooks. The 42-year-old Church Lawton opera buff threatened the structural well-being of the Regent when her rendition of Nessun Dorma almost took the roof off. As she hit the high note at the end, the crowd, as one, rose to their feet.

Theatrics weren't short on the ground, not least when the judges, having made their decision, returned through a cloud of smoke to the sort of music you might expect to hear in The Omen.

It's the cheesy cliché of such an evening but when Jonathan's wife Nikki Wheeler stated that the ten finalists 'are all winners', for once it didn't stick in the throat. Backing people's ability and showing faith in them delivers a priceless reward – it makes them feel they matter.

From Street Feet, the 9 to 11-year-old hi-energy all-girl dance group, described by Nick Hancock as 'the image of the nightmare sleepover' to 17-year-old singer Sarah Banks – 'the purest thing to come out of Bucknall for a very long time!' (Hancock again), the final provided endless examples of glittering talent.

Will any of us, for instance, ever enter M&S again without the vain hope that Gary Podmore, aka Vanity Case, won't be in full drag in the chilled foods section? Then there was Jack Eagles, the 13-year-old vocalist described as looking like a 'paperboy'. One, as you wait for your Sentinel, you can hear belting out I Will Always Love You three streets away.

Stoke's Top Talent came to an end last night. And yet surely the ball has only just started rolling.