After watching the series through and deciding I did not, in fact, come across as a complete and utter idiot, I watched it back again with Becky. We went from thinking, ‘Well, we could tell our families about this,’ to, ‘We can probably tell our friends about this,’ to, ‘We can probably tell everyone we know,’ to at the end thinking, ‘This is great. Maybe people might like this.’
I had one other realisation. I had begun by thinking we were making a series with someone who works in music education – what we call in the trade an ‘animateur’ – but as I realised that no one would know what that meant I appeared as ‘a conductor’. Some of the newspapers actually said, ‘London Symphony Orchestra conductor’, which of course was completely untrue. I had worked with the LSO, but the orchestra had a highly regarded, internationally renowned conductor of its own in Sir Colin Davis. Consequently there were a few reactions and rants along the lines of, ‘Who is this man, who thinks he is the London Symphony Orchestra conductor? Upstart oik. Put him back in his place!’
The first programme of the series went out in December 2006 – a good five months after all the emotion of that final night in China. It was the weirdest week. Strangers started speaking to me in the street. I was getting emails and phone calls from people I hadn’t seen for years. The weekend before the series was shown I had gone on a stag weekend in Spain with a mate of mine called Marcus. While we were out there I had a call telling me that the series had been featured in the TV preview section of The Times, which felt very exciting.
I then raced back from the stag do on the Sunday to appear on BBC Breakfast the following morning. Even though I had been pacing myself during the festivities, I had not left the bar until four in the morning and rushed to the airport to catch a plane at seven. I was very bleary-eyed. I just about got through Sunday, and then I had to wake up early again the next morning to be on Breakfast to launch the show. The great thing about live TV is that they slapped enough make-up on me so that no one could tell quite how tired I was – I hope.
As I had wearily got on the plane that Sunday morning to come back from Spain, despite the woolly head, I did have a very clear sense that I might just have enjoyed my final moments of anonymity. I wasn’t complaining. I had decided to sign up for this: I would roll with the punches.
How Foolish, Foolish Must You Be
A couple of months after the first series of The Choir had gone out on air, I found myself back in yet another school assembly, facing an audience entirely made up of teenage boys and a predominantly male staff. I thought that en masse they would be seriously sceptical about the prospect of singing. With only the briefest of warnings I was standing up in front of them to sing, completely unaccompanied, a traditional and to them doubtless unbelievably twee folk song called ‘She’s Like the Swallow’. To make matters worse, to find my starting note, I had peeped it rather weedily on a descant recorder. I suspected this was not going to appeal to the macho bunch lined up in front of me. I revelled in the incongruity.
Half an hour earlier, sitting around at breakfast in our less than salubrious hotel on the London Road in Leicester, Harry Beney, one of the directors of the new series, had said, ‘You’ve got to go and make an announcement to the school, Gareth. Why don’t you sing a song?’ ‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘that’s really good. That is exactly what I should do.’ This was my music education background coming to the fore: ‘Get in there, be unashamed about it, this is what I do. I like to sing, I am going to sing you a song.’
I thought I should choose a song that those particular schoolkids would not normally hear. I am sure most of them that morning had never heard an English folk song before, especially as the school had a high percentage of boys from an Asian background. So it felt absolutely right and proper, although I no doubt looked ridiculous. The headmaster certainly looked seriously bemused.
Yet many of the boys who were there later told me that was a key moment, because I was not afraid to stand up and sing in front of them; I was not afraid to make a fool of myself. Aleister Adamson said he respected me for coming in ‘all guns blazing’. I imagine they understood instinctively that I was telling them, ‘And neither should you be.’ With teenage boys you have to lead by example. I gritted my teeth and dug in.
The fact that I was there in that assembly at Lancaster School, Leicester, one of the biggest all-boy comprehensives in the country, was a direct reaction to what had happened in the wake of the Northolt experience. There had been a divided response to the first series. On the one hand there had been a great outpouring of public enthusiasm about it, which had taken me pleasantly by surprise. But to counteract that, there was a fair amount of criticism about its value as an educational project, and that criticism was the more telling because it raised questions that I had asked myself.
The executive producer for both series was Jamie Isaacs. At the time I was afraid of him, because not only does Jamie have a basso profundo voice that shakes the room as he speaks, but he has a single fleck of white hair in his eyebrow, which gives him the aspect of a superhero who might at any time cut you down with a laser coming from his steely glaze. However, Jamie was delighted. The ‘numbers’ from the first series were fantastic, peaking at around 3.7 million people. As he put it to me, ‘That’s one person on every single bus in the UK who knows who you are.’ Quite an adjustment for me. I’ve had to remember to be polite to bus drivers.
But not everyone was happy. Jamie was shocked: ‘My God, the choral world is really angry with you!’ A number of people had publicly said that the series was unrealistic because, as I knew myself, no music teacher would be able to devote that amount of time to working with one group of students. This was at a time when people were feeling the pinch in music education, and here I was spending hours and hours with a small group, funded by the BBC. I think there was an irritation among school music staff, along the lines of ‘I’ve been trying to set up a choir in my school for the last 15 years and not one pupil, especially any boys, wants to join my choir.’ Because that’s what choirs meant in 2005. As Jason Grizzle had said, it was the ‘gayest’ thing in the world. It was the thing furthest from their minds.
Before the first series ended I had spent a lot of time talking with Northolt High School about how the choir could carry on after the end of filming, and they had assured me that it was going to continue, as indeed it did. The school’s music staff, Clare Hanna and Patrick Golding, did their best to continue the choir. However, the final shot of that first series was of me walking out of the school pulling a suitcase behind me, and turning away down the street into the distance. It was a great shot for television, but it left many people asking, ‘How can he leave just when they are getting good?’ The reality of it was that half the Phoenix Choir were leaving the school that summer and going on to do other things. The rest were staying and they did have a choirmaster in place, but none of this featured, so I think people’s impression was that I had cynically dropped the project and gone, which had not been my intention. I continue to keep in touch with the Phoenix Choir, I catch up with some of them on Facebook from time to time, and I returned to Northolt a year later for a reunion (armed with a BAFTA!).
In the fall-out from the series, there was one blogger in particular, with the pseudonym of Florian Gassmann, who wrote a very insightful, if negative, blog about why it was a really bad series. ‘Malone’s efforts,’ he wrote, ‘seem to have failed to establish a choral tradition in the school – most people can manage a successful “one-off”, whether the cameras are there or not – and I’m not even sure I would brand this one “successful”. Thousands of hard-working music teachers demonstrate much more consummate skills, year in year out, without being able to offer “be on national TV” or “come to China” as incentives.’
Florian G. (the pseudonym of a head of music somewhere since he said he would never employ me in his department) had plenty more to say. ‘Real teaching is about establishing