Baton twirling
Alex James
Brad, who has been my constant companion for the last couple of months, was just starting to appreciate the strange power of television. The terrible authority, the ridiculous effects of time on the small screen had taken a while to become apparent. By the time the first show went out, we’d already been filming for a month, shadowed by camera crews, asking us to say things again, do things again, explain how we felt about this, that and the other, and after the first episode he was a bit ruffled. ‘I can’t believe it! Four weeks of cameras and microphones and I was only on screen for three seconds! What a waste of time.’ It was probably a little bit longer than three seconds, but television time doesn’t obey the laws of physics. It is all in troy measures. Four weeks of panning, all those days, distilled with precision into three seconds of hyper-reality.
‘Ivor was on for less than three seconds and my wife can tell he’s an a***hole,’ I pointed out, which seemed to cheer Brad up, and as the weeks went by and the show became a cult hit Brad told me people he hadn’t seen for years were getting in touch and, confusingly, when he took a break from filming for a week to fulfil a work commitment, he noticed even people that he didn’t know were reacting towards him in a different way from normal. People, he said, seemed more willing to listen to him, as if his whole being was legitimised in some way just by dint of being broadcast. That must be really scary for someone who was perfectly legitimate to start with.
It wasn’t as scary for me as I’ve already been on television enough to lose my grip on reality altogether. That happened years ago. Ironically, we were making a ‘reality’ show called Maestro. I’ve touched on it before in this column — the premise being to take eight contestants from different walks of life and try to turn them into conductors, with the eventual winner conducting the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park.
It was certainly one of the most incredible and worthwhile things I’ve ever done but I suppose all the most ‘exciting’ things I’ve done in the past couple of years have been on television: driving around Bogota with hit men, jumping off cranes into my back garden, building dams in Burkina Faso. Real life can’t really compete with TV. No wonder everyone wants to be a celebrity.
As the series went on, all the contestants were drawn deeper into a world that consisted only of orchestras, studying scores, counting quavers and memorising horn entry points, and their teachers who were all new to the television game into endless interviews and photo sessions. Music is one of those things, like the cosmos itself, that the more you study it, the more fascinating and bottomlessly beautiful it becomes. The reverse is true of showbusiness. The less you know about what’s under the surface of that stuff, the better. Brad, who is one of the world’s leading conductors, was my teacher, but we were both on a journey. I think I got the better deal. He was my guide to the core repertoire of the great works of classical music, the very language of God, and all I could do for him was hold his hand as he beheld the devil himself. The horribly addictive, mindexploding phantom of mass exposure.
I’ve never studied music properly before. I’ve only ever really done it. But as the field of competitors narrowed, the series became all-consuming, drug-like. I became a father and hardly had time to draw breath, straight from the delivery suite to an orchestral rehearsal, performing Gershwin’s lullaby ‘Summertime’, with the National Youth Orchestra. That was fantastic and surreal, a room full of smiling young geniuses and their instruments, the perfect toast to a heart that was filled with music.
And then, in a puff, it was all over. Suddenly I was out. Voted off by the orchestra. I had thought I might cry. Tears and tantrums are the engine of reality television, so no bad thing but, as I stood there in front of the BBC Concert Orchestra, the studio audience and ten cameras I felt a warm feeling that I realised was my life returning, a life that’s been on hold for as long as I can remember. The machine chews you up and spits you out. All you can do is smile and wave. What a journey, though.
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