The Choir

Anybody else watching The Choir? This is the documentary series / intelligent reality type show (I think there's a technical term for this kind of thing, if any of my TV-land readers care to supply it?) which started on BBC Two on Tuesday. I actually missed the first episode, but was alerted to it by the wonders of Twitter, and so I caught up with it on iPlayer.

Let's get something out of the way immediately: the presenter, Gareth Malone. Shall we take a look at him?



He is completely adorable. He looks about 12 (in fact: 34!?) and is by his own admission "quite posh" and never wears a two-piece suit where a three-piece suit will do, and is completely, brilliantly, unassumingly lovely and seems to have gone straight from cute chorister to cute choirmaster stopping only to take a break in "unlikely sex symbol". Unlikely unless you are me, anyway. (And half the rest of the world, suggests Google.) I mean, he's a choirmaster! With floppy hair! And he wears glasses! And given how much he has to conduct while he's working, with his hands, they are super-good at keeping his wedding ring out of shot almost all of the time. *Melt*.

OK, now let's move on.

Because aside from lovely Gareth, Gareth Malone, The Choir is also fabulous. It is exactly what the X Factor pretends to be, but isn't. It is the anti X Factor.

Here's the idea behind The Choir. In season one (which, criminally, I never saw), Gareth put together a choir in a dodgy school, with beautiful, heart-rending results. Then there was something called Boys Don't Sing. I don't know what that was. (Hey, it's not like I get paid to do this.) But in season two, or maybe three, there was this season of The Choir, in which gorgeous Gareth goes to a run-down (and very big) council estate near Watford and galvanises 200 of its residents into a community choir.

Gareth doesn't care if they can sing. He only cares that they want to sing. And the people are sort of nervous and sort of excited, and he enthuses them more and more and they do their best and they sing. SOB. I haven't been this moved since that one where they get the Birmingham teenagers to dance ballet. Oh god, I am getting tearful just thinking about it.

Anyway, gradually you get to know some of the characters in the choir, like Matty the cockney hardnut boxer who only turns up to one rehearsal but is properly proud of his community, and Dee, the beautiful, shy gospel singer who starts the episode describing being chased by teenagers shouting 'n*gger' and ends it being cheered by an entire shopping precinct for her solo in 'Higher & Higher', and pensioner Fred, with the lovely voice, whose wife has just died and who stands next to his kitchen sink saying sadly, "Everything reminds me of her. Everything," only The Choir resists the urge to drown him out in soupy music and then make him sing the Wind Beneath My Wings while Dannii Minogue weeps. Because it is not the X Factor.

It is not the X Factor. Because it's not about "talent" and it's not sentimental. It's not about pretending to celebrate the gifted while we mock the unworthy, as a scene in which a series of wobbly-voiced women audition for a solo clearly demonstrates. People are applauded - yes! - just for having the guts to try. The Choir is about real people who want something to be proud of, or just something to do, and who are willing to put a bit of effort in, with the help of a sweet chap who really does look a lot like a baby David Tennant.

In short: it's brilliant.

Episode 2 is next Tuesday, and UK-dwellers can catch up with it all on iPlayer.