The Choir on BBC America
 

Has anybody been watching this? It's kind of like real-life "Glee" (without the witty script). Last night, we saw choirmaster Gareth Malone take the 150-person choir he formed at a boy's school where "boys don't sing" to perform in from of 4,000+ people at the School Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London. You can watch that performance here. It may not be perfect, but when you realize that most of these boys wouldn't have dreamed of being part of a choir six months earlier, much less performing for thousands, it's just awesome. (The women in the choir are teachers at the school.)

From the program description:

Choirmaster Gareth Malone attempts to create choirs in the most unlikely settings. In the two-time BAFTA award-winning series, The Choir, Gareth sets his sights first on Northolt High School--a school with no music program, then on Lancaster School--an all boys school where sports dominates the landscape and lastly on South Oxhey--a blue collar community.

Gareth's belief that people should have access to sing beautiful music drives his fearless passion to unite people in song. He feels a choir allows people to come together and express themselves as a community which can be a deeply personal and touching human experience. But as he finds out, getting people together to form a choir is no small feat. He first has to overcome perceptions that being in a choir and singing is both uncool and embarrassing.

Gareth Malone is my new hero. This is one BBC show I would love to see adapted in the States.

The Choir on BBC America.

I watched the first five or so episodes with the first school, and I really had to force myself. I thought I'd enjoy it - I used to sing and was in several choirs - but I didn't.

Really? I'm curious why you didn't enjoy it.

I wanted to see more singing. They focused a lot on the particular kids, which I understand is important because Gareth believes that music is what's missing in today's schools. I think (for the first batch anyway, the kids who went to China) he was just trying to prove to himself that he could get them there. I mean, they really were hard to listen to.

I understand that most of them had never sung a note in their lives before. Perhaps if I saw more of their training, that would have been more fulfilling for me.

I can understand that. The first performance at RAH last night was of Ombra mai fù, and it was also a bit hard to listen to. I'd agree that if I was looking for marvelous music performance-wise, this wouldn't be where I would look.

Perhaps it's the influence of my particular GLO affiliation (:D), but it was the training and the focus on the kids that grabbed me. (And I'll admit that I'm a bit of a sucker and the kid with Hodgkins who can't play sports and who finally found a group at school where he fit in and felt pride particularly grabbed me.)

For me the focus was less on making fantastic music and more on opening the kids to new possibilities and encouraging them to make music together, which results in its own kind of "fantastic" music. I enjoyed (mostly) seeing/hearing them make music, but I really enjoyed watching the music have an effect on them. That's the story to me.

Oh, see, i only saw the first several episodes (between 4-6) that focused on that first school. I totally agree with the belief that there should be music in schools - I have been all about music and theater since I was in first grade. I just didn't think that in the first group, there was enough focus on the learning to sing. I'd love to hear/see the ranges of a bunch of the kids, how big their natural octaves were, then again, to hear the improvement after the x number of months. I'd love to have seen them learning to read music, not just "remembering" the notes and lyrics. I don't expect "marvelous" music out of first timers, but again, I'm not sure if all they learned was "the performance" versus learning the art and developing tools.

I believe, that if there was focus (perhaps we didn't get to see that part), it might make more sense to them as a whole, and perhaps give them the tools to continue to sing, whether in a church, a community choir, in musical theater, etc. Again, the first episodes focused so much on Gareth.

Perhaps that's a programming/editing issue. Did you see the first group/school's episodes? A lot of time was spent going over the same thing; the recaps were 5-10 minutes of each of the previous episodes. The parts where the kids (and parents) were proud were lovely. I guess I just wanted more. At the outset, I thought that the entire season (the BBC calls "seasons" - "series") was going to be the same school from Nov-June, so I guess that's why I felt like I was left hanging.

One of those kids looks like he could totally be my son lol

No, I hadn't found the show at that point.

In Britain, the entire 3-episode first "series" was that first school; it aired in 2006. There was an additional episode that went back and visited them that aired in 2008. The second school was the second "series" (4 episodes, 2008). The third series (also 4 episodes, 2009) focused on a community, and was followed by an episode revisiting the second school, if that makes sense. The first and second series both won BAFTAs.

BBC America seems to be sort of squeezing the series together.