Ludo spoke a little bit about Kate’s presenting career, and what he had observed about her experience of that. ‘Gareth,’ he told me, ‘I want you just to do your job, and for me to be there filming everything. When it goes well, I want to be right there knowing straight afterwards that it went well. Equally when it is bad, I want to see you pissed off at the end of the day and irritated. I want you to tell me that and believe that I will edit it fairly. Sometimes you might go too far, you’ll say something because you are emotional and tired, but you’ve got to trust me. It will be fair and balanced.’
His argument was that everyone lets off steam: you come home from a bad day at work and badmouth your boss to your wife, husband or whoever is around, and then you have a glass of wine and a sit-down and everything’s OK again. It’s part of the process of getting it out of your system. That was exactly what Ludo wanted. Ludo has a winning charm and I began to believe that it would be all right.
For a programme about music this was something of a leap of faith, because up until then in most documentaries about the arts that I had seen, everyone was on their best behaviour: ‘Well, when I worked with Sir so-and-so we got on very well, lovely chap, etc.’ You didn’t tend to see the rawness of the preparation and the ups and downs of the journey to get there. This was a chance to show the reality of struggling through difficulties to reach the final performance.
Perhaps because I had watched Brat Camp, I had seen how engagingly human that emotionally frank style of TV could turn out to be, and that it was important to have those peaks and troughs. The chat with Ludo had a big influence on me: it set me up for the way I approached the making of The Choir, which has been very, dare I say, organic, very much about following me setting up each of the choirs, on the good days and the bad: I am doing my job, making the decisions, dealing with the challenges, all under constant scrutiny. It’s been seven years now, so I have learnt to adjust to the pressure, but back in 2005 it was a very different story.
I was apprehensive about handing my life over to that degree. What made me feel a little more comfortable was that I was not handing my personal life over. This wasn’t going to be like The Osbournes. But I was handing my professional life over. And I didn’t even feel like it was the part of my professional life at which I was best. At the time I felt I was just getting good at singing. I was having lessons at a high level. That side of my life was going well, so what on earth was I doing trying to tackle a bunch of teenage kids and persuade them to start singing for me? I didn’t even consider myself to be a conductor.
One plus point was that I wasn’t living too far away from Northolt. Becky and I were renting a flat just off West End Lane in West Hampstead. During the series Ludo used an exterior shot of the outside of the building, which was a typical London town house. The building had four floors, was semi-detached and looked as though Gwyneth Paltrow or Nigella Lawson might live inside it.
In reality, the space had been carved up into small flats. We were living in two tiny rooms with the kitchen squeezed into one corner. We had all of our stuff crammed in. My office, the dining room, the living room, the kitchen and my rehearsal room were basically all the same space. On television it appeared as if we owned the whole house and people assumed I was this highfalutin choral director, which was a very long way from the truth. Every week I would catch the bus to Northolt. Heady days.
On that first day at Northolt High School what became clear to me was that music was not at the heart of the school’s activities. It was a foundation school that specialised in technology: indeed, I was given a tour round the brand-new information technology block. We weren’t actually going to be filming in there, but I could see that the head teacher, Chris Modi, was really proud of the new building. So we dutifully walked round, admiring the advanced network capabilities and smelling the new paint. I had a feeling at the time that this might not make it into the final documentary.
What I really wanted to know was what musical opportunities there were within the school. Because of the strong focus on technology, music just wasn’t a central part of the school ethos at the time. As Chris Modi himself put it, this was ‘fertile but unploughed ground’. This is not uncommon in schools where the head teacher is not particularly interested in music. It’s not that they are failing in their obligations to teach music, but there is a sense that they aren’t going the extra mile.
Against this background I needed to find some secret element of alchemy that would allow me to locate undiscovered talent and convert that, in an environment where singing was not really on the agenda, into a choir the whole school could support and be proud of. No mean feat. Without a large existing pool of singers to draw on there was nothing for it: I needed to get stuck into the auditioning process.
From early on, staff at the school had issues with the whole idea of auditioning: they hated the fact that we were going to be auditioning children on TV. They were terribly worried about it turning into something like The X Factor, and that we would humiliate the kids who weren’t good at singing. It was a fair concern. That was absolutely not what I wanted to do, but I did have to select the singers who would have the aptitude and commitment for this huge task. Creating a choir that could be selected for the World Choir Games in China was going to be a serious business. And besides, there were only 25 places on the plane.
Bournemouth School, where I was educated, was a selective grammar school. Everyone who was there had won a place by passing an exam. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the system, it had got me used to the idea of selection. Being auditioned seemed a perfectly normal thing to me: I’d been going to auditions since I was ten. I’d learnt early on that sometimes you didn’t get the part, that there was always the possibility of being rejected. At school I had missed out on being Romeo in Romeo and Juliet – a boy in the year below me got it. OK, that still rankles. But in general the idea of rejection was fine for me because I’ve got the resilience to bounce back and try again.
My school also had an atmosphere where achievement was really valued by the students and striving was cool. If you had the best result in the test, you got respect for it. You wanted to do well. I wanted to achieve. My school had both offered possibilities and fostered ambition: they encouraged you to go off and start your own projects and do whatever you wanted. It gave me a level of self-belief that has stayed with me ever since.
From many of the kids who auditioned I detected much less overt ambition. Like most teenagers they were content with the styles of music they knew and certainly would have seen little personal benefit in attempting to tackle the choral classics. Choral singing was not exactly the prevailing musical interest at Northolt High School when I turned up in 2005. Choir was not cool.
An audition process for me seemed the only way to tell who was serious and who just fancied being on TV. About 160 kids turned up. Something about the chance to go to China and to be on television caught their imagination and for some it kick-started a determination to succeed. Aiming high is so important in life. Why aim for the middle? I wanted to show these kids that you could do something truly adventurous.
Rhonda Pownall was one of the singers whose voice I liked a lot. She says that she was shocked by some of the kids who turned up to the auditions. She had thought it would be ‘the same faces who did singing. Asking people at high school to go and sing in front of a camera that was going to be broadcast nationwide was like asking them to perform star jumps in their vests in assembly.’
The auditioning took two full, very long days, with me sitting at the upright piano and the kids walking in one after another. I didn’t have long to assess their singing, but over the years I have become quite good at recognising who has potential. I usually know about three notes in. So I asked each of them to sing me a song, cold and unaccompanied, which told me masses. If they were singing something where I could discern a tune, even if was a song I didn’t know, that was always a very good sign.
Sometimes, however, it was hard to tell. A lot of the kids sang their own version of R&B songs with what appeared to be no discernable note, merely a collection of groans and squeaks. My brain was genuinely struggling to recognise