So it was that, armed with a little Sony PD150 camera, a girl called Dee from Twenty Twenty who knew how to focus the thing came over to St Luke’s and did some filming of a rehearsal of my children’s choir. I gave it my all. Things went quiet again for a while. I had an agonising wait for any news about the series over that summer. Even though I was thrilled by the prospect, I didn’t want to alert too many people by telling them that I had been approached to be in the series, just in case it all came to nothing.
Life went on. I graduated from my post-graduate course in vocal studies at the Royal Academy of Music in June. Afterwards, at lunch with my parents in Getti’s Italian restaurant on Marylebone High Street, with me wearing all my finery and clutching my certificate from the Academy, I told them: ‘Oh, I’ve had a phone call about this possible television project, but it probably won’t amount to anything because I don’t think they’ve got a broadcaster involved. It is all very early days.’
To my parents it didn’t seem that improbable that the TV job might happen. They had become used to the idea of me working, not just for the LSO but also with English National Opera, Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House on various education projects. However, I had begun other projects that had then fallen through, so in a very British way we were all quite reserved about the idea. But secretly I was really bloody excited.
It was important to me that my parents knew, because they had always been supportive of my musical ventures. My mother was, and is, a very good singer, who had studied as a child. She has a very pretty soprano voice, and loves opera. In fact, she had first met my father at the Gilbert & Sullivan Society in Tooting.
My father is also very musical, with wide-ranging tastes. His is a completely amateur enthusiasm, but he knows a huge amount about music, has an encyclopaedic memory for the Great American Songbook or anything twentieth-century, and rock and pop music up to circa 1972.
My maternal grandmother came from Mountain Ash in the valleys of South Wales, hence me being called Gareth. My grandfather was part of a theatrical family full of musical comedians, actors and actresses, so there was a huge amount of performance on my mother’s side of the family. I definitely think the humour and the clowning I often resort to comes directly from this – there is music and performance in my veins.
Over that summer of 2005 nothing much happened. I think it was heading towards the end of September when I got a call from Twenty Twenty, who had been busy pulling the series pitch together. At the end of an insane afternoon’s session for English National Opera, in a children’s centre working with about fifty toddlers, I was just leaving when my phone rang. It was Ana. She very simply said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it, it’s been commissioned.’ I asked, ‘What does that mean?’ ‘It means you are making a television programme.’
Click. It was one of those life-defining moments where I thought, ‘This could change absolutely everything but then again it could change absolutely nothing.’ At that stage I had the feeling that the series might just get put on at 11.30pm and ten of my parents’ friends would watch it. I worried that it would be like so many TV programmes: utterly forgettable.
But I did consider what might happen if people liked the series. One night in our flat in West Hampstead I had a seminal conversation with Becky. It was getting late and as we got up from the sofa to go to bed, I said, ‘If we say yes to this series, it could completely change our lives. We have got to consider that. What if it goes to five or six series?’ That seemed like a total pipe dream at the time, but when you are signing up for something like this, you just don’t know. It’s like being at the top of a rollercoaster waiting for it to begin – sickening but thrilling.
My gut told me that this could be a good thing, that it would use all my skills to good effect. That gave me confidence about it. But I didn’t want to dither about whether I was going to take the plunge or not. That evening Becky and I both agreed, ‘Yep, we’re prepared. Let’s do this.’ To be honest we had no idea what we were getting into. We were two students. What did we know?
What I did know was that I enjoyed talking, and that was going to come in handy if I was featuring in a television programme. I am an only child so I have never wanted for attention. As a boy I had had loads of adult company. I was always spoken to as an adult, and talked, a lot, at a very early age. I always say I could talk for England.
One way and another I was confident that I could perform on television, but I did not realise the size of the challenge that Ana had dreamt up for me: ‘Do you think you could take a group of children who’ve never sung before and get them ready for the World Choir Games in China?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I sucked in some air. ‘I’ll give it a try.’
The prospect of taking a school choir to the World Choir Games in China the following summer sounded like a good focus for the whole adventure. How naïve I was. I had no idea of the difficulty involved. But for time being I put fear and dread aside, sipped the first of too many pints of London Pride and got on with my thirtieth birthday party.
If They Only Learn
My first taste of this new reality was walking into Northolt High School. Northolt had been chosen for the first series of The Choir because it was in an area of ‘relative deprivation’ as the headmaster put it: that was the phrase everyone bandied about. The TV company weren’t going to send me to Eton after all – they wanted a place that screamed, ‘There is no choir here.’ That suited me fine.
Northolt wasn’t a place I knew much about, other than its location off the A40 heading west out of London and that it had a tube station somewhere along the far reaches of the Central Line. I discovered as I arrived in Northolt that it had a nice little duck pond in an almost villagey centre. And there was also this huge and forbidding school.
When I saw the buildings they immediately reminded me of the school I had been to in Bournemouth. ‘Oh, it’s one of those schools,’ I said, on camera. I was thinking about the period of architecture, but that brief remark got me into a bit of trouble.
What I’d really meant but failed to get across was, ‘It’s one of those schools from that particular era of architecture, built in a hurry just after the war,’ exactly like some of my school’s prefab buildings. What rather a lot of people imagined I meant was, ‘Oh, it’s one of those schools,’ as if I’d been educated up the road in Harrow on the Hill. Quite a few people got really upset, and I had several letters of complaint (another running theme in this book). In fact, when the programme went out, I had a text from my cousin Keith immediately after that comment was aired saying, ‘You’ve just lost a million viewers.’ A little too late I realised that everything I said might be taken out of context. There was a lot for me to learn.
Northolt had 1,300 pupils and, like all large schools, there was constant activity and noise, with kids and staff swirling around on a typical morning. Spotting me arriving, one smart alec shouted, ‘It’s Harry Potter!’ out of the window when he should have been concentrating on maths. This led to me having the nickname among the production staff of ‘Gary Potter’. Thanks very much to that young gentleman.
I suspected the BBC thought I might not survive but that it would make jolly good telly. However, I felt fairly robust going in there and not unduly daunted. I’d spent years working in places like Hackney, Lambeth and Tower Hamlets in some pretty hot situations. I knew how to handle myself – oh yes – or I thought I did. On the day I’d started with the London Symphony Orchestra in 2001 I had found myself in a classroom full of 30 decidedly sweaty teenage boys in Hackney, left alone in charge of them with just a double bass player for moral support, as the teacher seemed to have disappeared. Now that definitely was intimidating. Surely Northolt would be a walk in the park?
What I didn’t feel all right about was being filmed; that was much more stomach-churning. Shortly before filming I’d sat down with the director of the series, Ludo Graham, in the Black Lion pub in Kilburn for a ‘getting to know you’ pint. Ludo, who is married to Kate Humble from Springwatch, was very experienced in this kind of television. Previously he had made Paddington Green, a documentary series in