Mel B (Marion Curtis/StarPix)
TOUCHY: Wasn’t Howie Mandel supposed to be phobic about germs? Doesn’t seem to have trouble grabbing new “AGT” judge Heidi Klum yesterday. Is Mel B (inset) next? (
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New “America’s Got Talent” judges Heidi Klum and Mel B have their work cut out for them.
At an audition filming at the Hammerstein Ballroom yesterday — the first time the new judges have been in New York — veteran “AGT” judge Howard Stern took every opportunity to needle and poke the newbies, making fun of Klum’s grasp of English (she’s a native of Germany) and Mel B’s chaotic career with the singing group The Spice Girls.
“These two are new, they don’t understand it,” Stern remarked after Mel B (real name: Melanie Brown) and Klum X’d a wacky performer that Stern and the panel’s fourth judge, Howie Mandel, loved.
Both women couldn’t stand a ventriloquist who worked a boy puppet giving a school report about the dangers of vermin, then being eaten mid-speech by a man in a giant squirrel suit. “Maybe it got lost in translation,” Stern said about Klum’s failure to see the humor.
Mel B, formerly Scary Spice, will think twice about criticizing performers after she knocked a guitar and voice duo for being off-pitch.
“Mel was telling me the Spice Girls had a similar problem: Posh Spice couldn’t sing,” Stern snapped.
On the red carpet outside the “Today” show yesterday, Klum insisted she has a solid rapport with Stern.
She also complained about getting “10-year wrinkles” from Mandel, who makes her laugh.
Klum and Stern certainly sounded playful when Klum applauded the physiques of a musical duo who stripped down to their underwear. Stern piped in, “You’re just horny.” And Klum responded, “That’s beside the point.”
Fans who wrote in for tickets to yesterday’s taping aren’t won over by the new-look panel, necessitated when Sharon Osbourne quit the show last year in a spat with NBC.
Patty Raczki from Oceanside, Long Island, thought that Mel B. and Heidi Klum were “a little too harsh.” Her son Eugene piped in, “They have no talent. I want a woman like Sharon. Remember Sharon?”
Vicki McGowan, of Media, Pa. said she was “pleasantly surprised” by Klum and Mel B.’s seriousness. “I thought they were going to be too easy,” she said. “You know, like a Paula Abdul [on ‘American Idol’] kind of thing.”