Assuming - and in hope there are still some members who enjoy this sort of post, following the latest Britains Got Talent  show, i wondered about competition to entertain. The Greeks went in for it in a big way with poetry, song and drama competitive festivals - cut throat competition there with fan support - the whole bag. What of other places and times?
Britain, of course, no longer has talent - most of the competitors are foreign.

Oddly and coincidentally, the name Susan Boyle came up in some crossword I was doing, which reminded me of talent quests. Though the wikipedia story about her didn't mention it, I felt she was the subject of some mockery about her appearance and talent. 
I know you're not supposed to any more, but I still enjoy beauty contests, despite (or because of?) not being in the least beautiful myself. 

India seems to enjoy beauty contests. Perhaps because their women are beautiful, having dark eyes and hair combined with a stylishness of their own.

Didn't the Celtic bardic tradition of medieval Ireland, Scotland and Wales often include a degree of competition, with noted performers contending against each other for titles, honour and patronage?  Probably this was a result of both the highly-regarded status of bards within Celtic society and also from the unusually disciplined and codified - some might say restrictive - nature of Celtic musical and literary traditions. The annual festivals of the Welsh eisteddfod and Irish Oireachtas na Gaeilge continue today and while admittedly in their current form they owe much to the cultural revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries, Welsh eisteddfodau are recorded as being regularly held with the patronage of medieval Welsh princes until the country lost its independence under Edward I.

There are also the hotly-contested competitions between colliery brass bands and of Welsh miners' choirs, with such organisations dating back to the early 19th century. In the UK, although the coal mines themselves have now mostly closed, the competitions continue. For example for brass bands (now not exclusively just colliery bands) competitions are held throughout the year at local, regional and national levels, operating a sort of league system with regular promotions and relegations, and with it all culminating in the annual National Brass Band Championship.

I've had a quick search on Google and apparently the Glastonbury Festival this year (2023) has an Emerging Talent feature.  I used to know someone who was involved with the local Young Farmers' group (mind you this is going back to the 1980s) and one year back then they had a 'dressing up' contest, for children - 'Dressing Up Madonna' for girls and 'Dressing Up Boy George' for lads.  Is 'dressing up' a talent - it could legitimately be said to include a degree of inventiveness I think.  These days I watch TV via computer but I can remember the "Young Musician of the Year" competitions.  Some of the young musicians were indeed talented.

The Eurovision Song Contest staggers on though not all acts are from Europe these days.  I don't go out of my way to watch it but some folk use it as an excuse for a party.

While southern Europe is currently experiencing a heatwave this July, for those of us in the British Isles it feels more like autumn this weekend with cool temperatures and wet gales. Whatever the weather, however, summer fetes across the country will go ahead with flower shows and baking competitions etc. Because of the very localised nature of a summer fete (often organised by villages, parish churches or schools etc but with few written records kept on them), it’s difficult to date how long they have existed. Some suggest hundreds of years while others say thousands.
    
This is also the case around the world to a greater or lesser extent. In ancient Japan, for instance, local competitions on garden displays, seashell collections, paintings and poetry recitals are well documented. Similar to the bardic tradition mentioned by Meles, Japanese poetry recitals were already receiving imperial endorsement by the 13th Century with the prestigious poetry competition (utakai hajime) being hosted by the emperor himself and which survives to this day.

Away from the imperial court, a famous description of a poetry contest (uta-awase) is the Tōhoku'in Poetry Contest among Persons of Various Occupations (1214). In it a scribe acts as judge and the poems are recited by a range of characters such as doctor, a blacksmith, a nun, a fisherman, a priest, a carpenter, a gambler and a shopkeeper. In this it bears a remarkable similarity to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1353) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1400).