Well that’s what you get when you go on TV. You become public property. I must admit that I was furious when I read this. It felt unjust. It hurt. But in some ways I think it spurred me on in the following years to find greater and greater ways of proving this man wrong. So Mr Florian Gassmann, I thank you. This inspired me to fight back.
I had made repertoire choices that were wrong, our goal was unrealistic and what was going to happen to those kids afterwards? He said it was my responsibility as a practitioner to make sure that I saw that through. I was thinking, ‘Really?’ I had never been in that role before. In all my previous jobs I had worked for a boss, so someone more senior would take care of any aftermath and more experienced people could think about the wider aspects of any project. Here I was suddenly in the firing line, getting all the flak.
Luckily I could set Florian Gassmann’s blog and others like it against an absolute outpouring from people who had loved The Choir, a pile of letters saying how moved they were by it, how it had really touched a nerve. But that one particular blog preyed on my mind, because I knew many of the points of criticism to be true and valid. There were things we could have done better.
Although I was piqued, the criticism did me an enormous amount of good because I found that I had the resilience for a role at the national level, and I determined to address those issues when I had another opportunity to make a series of The Choir. The first series went out in December 2006, just before Christmas – perfect timing. I had the first calls about a second series around that time and we started having planning conversations soon after the New Year break.
As I sat in those meetings, I realised that the word ‘unrealistic’ that had cropped up as a negative had really struck home. I always see the first series as a Disney version of what a choir can be like: the joining, the coming together and the big emotional pay-off at the end, a lovely, simple fairy-tale structure. Now I wanted to aim for a much more organic approach. I got fired up with indignant zeal. ‘Right, we are going to damn well make the most ethical programme we possibly can. I am going to think about legacy. I am going to make sure that this goes right out across the school.’ I wanted to get the end points right this time and have more involvement in the overall direction.
Ana DeMoraes reminds me that the second series grew out of the first: ‘We started thinking what to do next, and it was Jamie Isaacs who suggested we should concentrate on boys, as that had been one of the best aspects of the first series. You felt really strongly about it: boys think singing is “gay”, or it’s for girls. So it seemed like a logical progression.’
But the first series had been so emotionally demanding, how could we top that? Ana, too, wanted it to feel like a bigger commitment this time, and with a legacy. ‘The idea came that you should actually join a boys’ school as one of the teachers, and work with the existing music teacher to change the boys’ – and the staff’s – attitudes to singing.’
Originally we had been looking at the idea of me teaching in another mixed school like Northolt, but at the last moment we opted for a single-sex school. With the production team I was looking at tapes from various possible schools, and it came down to two schools that everyone liked. I watched the video from Lancaster School in Leicester and remarked, ‘Boys … That is really difficult. Yes, that is exactly what I want to do, because that was the big problem on the first series: the boys were impossible. So why not go right into the jaws of the lion with a boys’ school where nobody sings and see if we can make them sing?’ Of course once I’d said that, it was a no-brainer. So I took on the challenge of getting 1,250 testosterone-charged boys to sing.
Lancaster School in Leicester was grappling across the board with the same problem we had uncovered at Northolt; that singing, especially among boys, was not cool. It felt like a really demanding challenge. I had proved that I could make a choir, but could I make a choir under much more difficult circumstances where there were no girls to help me out?
The whole thing was far more organic, much more experimental. On the first series the possibility of performing in China was already on the cards as we started out. When we went into Lancaster School, we had no idea what we would be able to provide as the big end to the series. We didn’t know what we were doing. We had the vague ambition: ‘Wouldn’t it just be great if the entire school would sing?’ while simultaneously thinking, ‘Oh my God, how are we ever going to do that? These are sullen, disinterested teenage boys. They are not all going to sing …’. But that was the goal.
This time round, and it’s to Twenty Twenty’s credit that they allowed me to do this, I started to become much more of an active participant. I felt empowered to say, ‘No, hang on a minute, it doesn’t feel right to do that yet. We can’t perform here, we can’t do that, this is what we need.’
I had also acquired a small amount of authority; only a patina of authority, but authority nonetheless, that allowed me to cold-call people more actively. So I rang the local music service to say, ‘I am in the area, what support could you give me? Is there any way we can work together?’ When I got in touch with King’s College, Cambridge, there was now an understanding of ‘Ah yes, it’s that Choir programme. That was really popular. Maybe this could allow us to show what we can do, what is possible and what is of quality.’ That really shifted things, as doors were that bit easier to open when I was looking for ideas or support. Whenever I picked up the phone to people, they wanted to help and advise.
It felt like it was a fresh start all round. Becky and I had just bought a flat in Kilburn and I had been reunited with my piano, which her parents had kindly been piano-sitting for the best part of three years. (In our rented box in West Hampstead I’d been using a digital keyboard.) I knew I would be playing a lot over the coming months, and felt I ought to brush up my piano skills, so I arranged for it to be craned up and in through the window and its arrival helped to mark the start of a new period, although until you’ve seen your favourite possession dangling 20 feet in the air on a crane you haven’t lived.
And so in spring 2007 I arrived at the school full of eagerness and ready to begin. I soon found out that for many of the pupils, singing was an alien concept. I knew what the problem was and if I hadn’t known then I was swiftly reminded by a random boy in the corridors: ‘Singing is boring, innit, like church singing … It’s gay.’ The gay word again. Only this time with a tinge of genuine homophobia: singing makes you gay. Nobody at Lancaster should openly admit to being gay; so nobody should sing. I was up against it here.
If Northolt High School had been my work experience, then going into Lancaster School was my proper apprenticeship. I learnt to teach. I learnt classroom management working alongside the head of music, Helen Collins, who was a hugely inspirational influence for me. I watched her getting things right, I watched her getting things wrong. I got things right, I got things wrong. We tackled the challenge together, over the months of the project. It was a completely different experience.
Helen had a fantastic relationship with the boys. She had most of them right in the palm of her hand. She was a really good person to be dealing with a group of teenage boys as she had previously been working with very demanding and difficult kids in Pupil Referral Units, and she had an air of complete unflappability, which was a huge asset. And she had sung in choirs, which meant she understood the whole purpose and point of what we were trying to achieve.
She had noticed that around the ages of thirteen or fourteen the boys lost interest in singing, unless it was rock or rapping. She remembers now, ‘Trying to get them to sing was hard, but even harder was trying to get them to sing in front of others. The boys would do it but only because they’d been heckled into it by me, through detentions and other means: bribery, chocolate, whatever I could throw at them to do it.’
Thank goodness Helen was there to guide me, because when it came to the teaching, I felt ill about the prospect. Yes, I had confronted some of Hackney’s most reluctant musicians in a number of school outreach projects, but then I knew I was there for one day only and that I would be going home at the end of the workshop and not coming back. At Lancaster School I was doing it every day,