My Musicality diary (or 'How I survived the shortlisting process') by Caroline Bacle (researcher, Diverse TV)
You'd think it would be an easy task. Or at least a reasonably straightforward process. But for the Musicality production team, New Year 2004 was greeted with a fierce tornado of application forms, audition tapes ... and panic attacks. Our mission: to dig, search and uncover – from a mountain of 2,000 submissions – an 'unknown', up for the challenge of performing for one night on a West End stage.
Application packages were shuttled from the sorting office to the Musicality headquarters in large post bags. By 7 January – the deadline for applications – the entire carpet in our office was covered in bubble envelopes. If we were going to hold the first round of auditions in March, we'd better get a move on ...
Helpers came to the rescue, filing applications, labelling tapes, entering names and addresses into our master database from any and all available computers in the building. I remember early mornings, late evenings, lots of coffee, not to mention many a sing-along rendition of Miss Saigon's 'Why God Why?'
Next, what we refer to as our 'tape watchers' stepped in to make an initial cut. Up for the challenge, these West End professionals each plugged into a pair of headsets and plopped themselves in front of television monitors for hours on end, screening all 2,000 tapes and ranking them as 'Keep', 'Keep-Bin', 'Bin-Keep' or 'Bin'. They came in shifts, day and night. We gave them nicknames, we got them cappuccinos ... And we celebrated with cake and champagne when it was all over and they'd brought the tally down to about 600 'Keeps' and 'Keep-Bins'.
The next step of the process involved recording the top 600 onto compilation viewing tapes for our panellists Mary King, Gareth Valentine and Stacey Haynes. And so we compiled the candidates' auditions, at about 10 per tape: playing, recording, stopping, logging ... 600 times. How many versions of 'This is the Moment' from Jekyll and Hyde can one hear before losing one's mind, you wonder? We can tell you ...
With this done we sent off bunches of tapes to Mary, Gareth and Stacey, with accompanying names and descriptions of each candidate. It was now up to them to screen the talent and give a second mark to the audition tapes.
Anecdotes, you ask? Well, one evening Mary King was mugged outside her home. The man in question stole her bag and, in it, a big bunch of compilation tapes. Fortunately our Mary quickly recovered from the experience – and we had tape backups – but we live with the knowledge that someone somewhere in South London has in his possession evidence of stacks of Musicality hopefuls ...
And then there was the day that a short, grainy clip of a young man in a vest top dancing in a stage performance of West Side Story popped up at the very end of one of Mary's tapes – with no description, no name. She sent us back her watching notes with a remark in bold capitals: 'WHO IS BOY IN VEST TOP SINGING WEST SIDE STORY?' Scratching our heads in panic that one may have slipped through the net, we put our thinking caps on red alert and trawled through tapes, notes, databases, until we could finally put a name to the mystery clip: Warren Sollars.
With our panel having viewed all 600 auditions, we set up tape-watching sessions to make a final cut of 200. The people selected from these group viewings would be invited to the first round of auditions in March.
We got together whenever we could synchronise Mary, Gareth and Stacey's hectic diaries: evenings, the odd Saturday and Sunday, afternoons before Gareth dashed off to conduct Anything Goes ... We lined up the boxes of tapes, filled everyone with caffeine and biscuits, and watched all of the panel's 'Yes's and 'Maybe's. I held my post, sitting cross-legged next to the telly, stacking up tapes in order as we went along. 'Forward this bit Caro.' 'Stop!!' 'Rewind ...' 'What does this person do for a living?' 'What is that song?' Each panellist had their favourite, from the 'Motorcycle Guy' driving into frame to deliver his introduction, to the couple singing 'I've Had the Time of My Life' from Dirty Dancing at a wedding reception, to a young man dancing in and out of frame to Barry White ... There were heavy debates, laughs, cries, and blank stares.
Against the odds, we did it. By the end of our tape-watching sessions we had our top 200 and were ready for the first round of auditions.
