Читать книгу Choir: Gareth Malone - Gareth Malone - Страница 10

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 enthusiasm, offering continued vibrant experiences and engaging generations of pupils for years to come – all skills that Gareth Malone has failed to show he possesses … I suspect that he will come to regret selling his soul to the devil.’ Ouch.

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, standing up in front of 30 unconvinced kids and trying to claw my way through a lesson with pretty minimal training. That was intimidating.

Helen had not been at the school very long, maybe just over a year, and had made good headway but saw this as an opportunity to shake things up. She had seen the previous series of The Choir and I think that had given her the belief to persuade Paul Craven, the headteacher, to let me come into the school. She says, ‘Paul thought it was a good idea, although some of the staff were a little reticent. They thought it might be a Panorama documentary into inner-city schools.’

Where technology had been at the heart of Northolt High School, sport was one of the driving forces at Lancaster School. Lewis Meagor, a floppy-haired cherubic boy with all the promise of an all-rounder, commented that singing ‘wasn’t the cool thing to do. Everything was about football, basketball, rugby, cricket. Sport, sport, sport.’

The sports department had their own separate building. Once I’d got out on the sports field, a lot of this department became the lifeblood of the staff choir, but initially there was suspicion on both sides. Schools are like marketplaces: each department has to fight to be heard. The teaching staff are obliged to concentrate so much on results and making sure that the basics are covered – that the maths department is functioning, that the English department is covering the curriculum – that it seems to me that knowledge is in danger of becoming segregated, which happens less in the real world.

Music, however, is a wonderfully multi-faceted discipline, involving history, technology and science, to name but a few elements; so I believe quite strongly that separating this subject from the others is artificial. When I was at school it was certainly like that. From what I remember, I don’t think there was very much love lost between my wonderful and inspiring music teacher, Stephen Carleston, and the head of sports, who also made me feel like the enemy. This project would be about settling some old scores.

So with this in mind, it felt rather predictable to come into this school in Leicester where sport and music were based in different buildings and both sets of staff were trying to timetable things at the same time. It felt as if the music department would never leave the comfort zone of their own classrooms to go over to the sports department – and vice versa – to say, ‘Is there any way we could make this work?’ None of them had any spare time. They all had so many obligations.

I had a unique opportunity to go in to see the sports guys and say, ‘Well, why don’t you have Tuesday and I’ll have Wednesday?’ so that the boys who were good at sports and music could do both. In that environment, this way of thinking felt quite unusual, even revolutionary. The same divide goes on in the kids’ minds as well: you are either a ‘sports’ kid or a ‘music’ kid. My point of view was, ‘Why not be both? They are not mutually exclusive.’

However, we all had a lot to learn. When I decided to start up a staff choir, I was amazed at the variety of excuses the staff members came up with not to attend the first rehearsal. My favourite was the joyous individual who, when I accosted him and asked, ‘Are you going to come to staff choir?’ gave me a point blank, ‘No!’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. His answer will stay with me for a long time as the most unexpected I have ever heard. Without missing a beat he said, ‘Horses …’.

But the weeks went by and the resistance of the boys was impressive. In some of the lessons I began to get an unpleasant hotness in my ears that reminded me of being told off by the teacher when I was eight years old. The boys knew how to push, push, push until they found a weak spot. I was out on a limb and flailing about. The seemingly insurmountable difficulty of trying to create a choir while implementing singing across the curriculum started to dawn on me. Florian Gassmann’s words rang in my ears. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this teaching malarkey after all.