So here’s two things I would never have put together, Simon Cowell and hamsters! But apparently the music mogul has a real passion for the rodents and owned eighteen as pets when he was younger.

“I loved watching them run on their wheel. One could even swim underwater,” he said during a recent audition for the ITV1 show.

Cowell revealed his secret passion after Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan accused a contestant of “looking like a hamster”.

They added that the auditionee didn’t smile enough and Simon defended her saying:

“I used to have hamsters and they never smiled either.”