Choral Tributes

I learned not long ago that the music master at my old school had died. I remember Jack Hindmarsh with huge fondness - he was a massive Father Christmas of a man who used to run the choir at Haileybury. Pretty much everyone at the school was a member of the choir, regardless of singing ability (you didn't have to audition, which helped massively), from the Aled Jones-a-like 13 year olds up to sixth form blokes who were built like outhouses and spent most of the rest of their time beating each other up on rugby pitches. Everyone loved Jack - he always seemed to be smiling, was hugely enthusiastic and encouraging and rehearsals for school concerts constituted some of the few good times I had in my two years there.

Watching the BBC's The Choir made me think how lucky I was to have had such an inspiring person encouraging me to sing - and how many people will never have the chance to experience how amazing it feels to sing with a big gathering of other people, largely because they think, 'It's not for the likes of us'. I'd missed the previous series that Gareth Malone was on (I think it was encouraging dissafected teenaged boys to sing), but having watched the series, I think I might want to see him on TV at least once a week till the end of time.

The series didn't start out looking promising - after his previous efforts, Gareth had predictably received loads of letters asking him to come and help people to start up their own choirs. The one that caught his eye (for which read the producer's, but that's fine) was from a lady vicar called Pam, who was despairing about her run down and depressed-sounding community, South Oxhey. Off went Gareth and the film crew to check it out. It really did look rubbish - empty precinct in the centre of town, nothing much to do, people wandering around looking gloomy. Gareth's idea of starting up a community choir looked, to say the least, like a massive challenge.

Gareth, I think it's fair to say, looks like David Tennant's auburn-haired fifteen year old cousin attending a Harry Potter convention. Slight and posh, he's the kind of man whose jeans will always be indigo and well pressed, and who wears jackets and coats made of proper fibres like wool and tweed. Despite looking like he'd lose a fight to a bantamweight within the first twenty seconds, he's clearly made of stern stuff. He wanted this town to have something to be proud of, and a choir was it.

Off he went round the town, on his own, flyering like a madman and enquiring poshly of everyone he met if they liked to sing. 'No', appeared to be the most popular answer, followed by a look that suggested poor Gareth had taken leave of his senses to even ask. At the appointed hour for the inaugural meeting of the community choir in a hall somewhere in the town, tons of chairs had been optimistically laid out. I was worried twenty people were going to turn up and Gareth was going to cry (I spent most of the subsequent episodes worrying that no-one was going to turn up for things and that Gareth was going to cry; this possibly says more about the things that I've tried to organise in the past than it does about the denizens of South Oxhey. Or Gareth.) Something like 175 people turned up. 'Christ!' I shouted at the telly, 'that's fucking amazing!' Gareth looked stunned. Most people looked like they weren't entirely sure why they were there, but heck, they might get on the telly, and then they needn't bother coming back next week.

Gareth got them all singing a pop song. They seemed to like it. They still thought he was a posh nutter, but most of them were smiling shyly. I got a bit teary when recently widowed, and obviously cripplingly lonely, Fred said it was the best night he'd had for ages and he'd met some nice people. Gareth said he wanted them all to do a gig in the precinct, to involve the whole community in what they were doing. Predictably, there was a lot of muttering about how no-one would turn up and it would all fail dismally. But the brilliant thing was that nearly all of them turned up for rehearsal the next week - and kept on going. Fired up by a minor success in the precinct ('Nothing like this has ever happened in South Oxhey before!', which was to become a sort of motto for the show), Gareth unleashed his next plan: singing something classical, tricky, without any accompaniment, over six minutes long - and in Latin. More muttering (what is it about the British that makes them automatically assume they a/ can't do things and b/ if they try, it'll be shit, even when they've just been successful at something?), but Gareth was away. 'If I didn't think you could do it, I wouldn't have suggested it', he insisted. They had a few weeks and then they were going to do a proper concert - and in the meantime they were going to do their homework.

This involved Gareth going house to house with a portable keyboard and not only teaching people to sing, but giving them a few Latin lessons at the same time. Needless to say, they managed to pull it off and rebuilt their community in the process. New friendships had been established; single mothers had got closer to their daughters and felt that there was something in South Oxhey for them; Fred the lonely widower met a foxy lady who'd lost her husband and they went ballroom dancing - the whole thing had me reduced to messy floods of tears every week. It was bloody lovely. Gareth got a choir of school kids together. He managed to get Matty, a local boxer who dropped out of the choir after the first rehearsal, to gather together a group of burly blokes to come to the pub. He really, really wanted them to sing. They all look nonplussed, despite the fact I bet they'd all sing for 90 minutes solid if they went to a football match. They clearly thought it was gay. But somehow soon they were singing Oasis, and by the end of the episode they'd gone round a load of local pubs singing, and were fully signed up members of the Gareth Appreciation Society.

The final episode involved Gareth getting the choir a recording gig at Abbey Road and then organsing a festival - at which he'd bring the choir, the kids' choir and Matty's burly blokes together for a massive sing song. Now that was bloody incredible. Defying cynicism and the belief that loads of towns must have that 'nothing good ever happens here', they pulled it off - everyone, I suspect, having gone from trying hard because they wanted to please Gareth because he said he believed in them, to trying and working hard because they finally believed in themselves and they really wanted it to be bloody great.

What I found myself wondering when I was watching this was, in a community, do you need an outsider to inspire you and bring you together? Because if they were the same as you, why should you believe them - who the hell do they reckon they are to think that they can lead you? It made me sad that there must be loads of people trying to get local initiatives off the ground, which would have exactly this effect of bringing people together and making them feel positive about where they live (the old notion of 'civic pride', if you will) and failing because of our default setting of grumbling, whingeing gloom.

And then I thought, 'this is lovely, but what happens when Gareth goes back home? What are they going to do then? The choir will fall apart and they'll go back to how they were'. The council said they'd put in a choir master for a bit. But the choir didn't want that, they wanted Gareth - he knew them, he knew what they could do, and more important, they knew him. No one would be as good as him. A hundred and fifty people signed a petition to ask him to stay on - which finally reduced Gareth to tears. And he did decide to stay on. They're very lucky to have him and I think the BBC should start a cloning programme so that every major town can have a Gareth. Screw watching X-Factor, we should all be in a church hall, putting together a jazzy version of Walking on Sunshine - Britain would be a much better place.