I Am What I Am (10 page)

1 Trust your judging panel has your back

(unless one of them doesn’t).

2 Trust your opinions even when they’re not popular

(with the other judges).

3 Beware of pissed-off parents of performers.

4 A sense of humour makes a good first impression

(especially on me).

5 Coordinate your outfit with the beautiful woman to your left

(not Barry Humphries).

I
may have already helped to pick the right Maria and the best Joseph, but when it came to choosing a Nancy,
¹
when I joined the panel on BBC1’s
I’d Do Anything
, the expertise I’d developed as a judge was really put to the test.

I found my feet as a judge in the early stages of the
Maria
show. During the panel auditions for
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
, David Ian wore the earpiece and I went to school on him.
²
I listened, I watched and I learned. If the producers saw something on their monitors from the other room that they wanted to see again or that they wanted highlighted in a particular way, they talked to David through this earpiece.

Meanwhile, I discovered that if I asked the performers questions and established a bit of a rapport with them as soon as they came in front of me, they relaxed a little and this helped them to get their breathing calmed before they actually performed. So, with all this knowledge at my fingertips by the time
I’d Do Anything
began, I was more than ready for the challenges … or so I thought.

Zoë Tyler was not on the panel this time. The other judges were Denise Van Outen, the Lord and Barry Humphries. As I did in
Any Dream
, during the panel auditions, when the contestants are performing for only the judges and the producers, I wore the earpiece. I was the judge with the voices in my head.
³

I’d never worked with Barry before, but we got along really well. I’ve always admired and enjoyed his work. There’s a whole group of performers from those early days of British theatre and television that
I think contributed to the definition of what it means to be an entertainer, one that in my own twenty-first-century-when-everything-changes way I’m trying to shape, too. Angus Lennie, Rikki Fulton, Bruce Forsyth, The Two Ronnies, Danny La Rue and, of course, Stanley Baxter were all in that same category.

Little-known fact about the Barrowmans.
⁴
My mum grew up across the street from Angus Lennie and she remembers that when he was a teenager, he’d leave his house every afternoon for his violin lessons and the other kids would taunt him, yelling, ‘Go on yer own, Hal the Fiddler.’
⁵

You may remember Lennie from
Crossroads
, or more recently
Monarch of the Glen
, but, as far as my dad’s concerned, Lennie will always be Flying Officer Archie Ives, aka The Mole, in one of my dad’s favourite movies of all time,
The Great Escape
with Steve McQueen. His other favourite is
Von Ryan’s Express
with Frank Sinatra fighting Nazis. Why Sinatra, you may ask? Well, because he could. When my mum catches my dad sneaking another viewing of the film late at night on some obscure US cable channel, he’ll tell her he’s watching it because he ‘keeps hoping this time he’ll catch the bloody train’.
⁶

Don’t tell my mum, but I keep a DVD set of these two movies, plus
The Guns of Navarone
as a bonus, hidden among my collection at the house in Sully – in case my dad ever needs a hit while he’s staying with me.

Unfortunately, despite Barry Humphries’s talents and versatility, and his undoubted place in the entertainment hall of fame, some of the Nancy contestants thought he came across as a bit of a ‘dirty old man’ on camera. Here’s why. Imagine one of the Nancys has just performed, then read this dialogue in a low-pitched, not-quite-Dame-Edna-ish voice:

‘You don’t look so much like a milkmaid –’ (pause for slightly heavy breathing) ‘– but you look very much like the milker.’

How do you respond to that? ‘Hmm, thanks, Barry. I’ll take that on board. Let me just dart out and get a breast reduction.’

Here was another one: ‘Please, Samantha, I want some more!’ And then there was: ‘You were gorgeous! You had a touch of the guttersnipe, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.’

Sometimes, his comments could be a bit irrelevant, with little constructive purpose, especially when he was commenting on Jodie Prenger.

During the auditions, when I first met Jodie, she said something sassy and she made me laugh. A sense of humour makes good television, so I knew she had to be involved in the programme. I also knew the audience would like her because she was very down to earth and honest in her presentation of herself. She came across as your sister, your co-worker, or the girl you’d want to talk to if your boyfriend dumped you.

I know a lot of people may not believe me on this, given some of my comments after a few of her performances, but in the beginning I also thought Jessie Buckley was very talented. I still think she is. From the initial auditions, I thought Jessie would have incredible growth during the series, and I thought the same thing about Ashley Russell. I believed that, given the chance, both women would develop into strong performers. Sarah Lark was equally formidable when she started because she was already working in the West End. Ironically, this may have worked against her because she may have appeared too polished for the role of Nancy.

All in all, the performers trying for the part were as talented a group as any of the artists I’ve had to work with on these shows. So it was a bit of a blow from left field, and certainly not one I saw coming, when the high drama of this series came my way from another member of the panel.

Sir Cameron Mackintosh was not officially a judge on this show, but as the main producer of
Oliver!
, he took a keen interest in the casting process and joined the judging panel once the competition came down to its final four contestants (Jodie, Jessie, Sam Barks and Rachel Tucker). Cameron was in the audience for all the panel auditions, the rehearsals post-Nancy camp, and for all the shows, but
because of his decision to stay in the wings until the climax of the series, he didn’t have much of a chance to build a public rapport with the contestants, or a relationship of any kind with the show’s audience. In the end, I think this may have had an impact on the show’s finale and Cameron’s offstage confrontation with me.

Over the course of
I’d Do Anything
, as Jodie began to demonstrate to the panel that she was learning from all the feedback we were giving her, the viewers were beginning to recognize that Jodie might be the one to watch. This also meant that some people, Cameron in particular, were getting tougher with their critiques of her performances.

After every show, and this held true for
Maria
and
Any Dream
too, the contestants would come up to the BBC bar afterwards. If they asked me for advice or more feedback, I’d happily give it. Almost every week, Jodie would come over and chat with me. One night, after a tough show when things had not gone well for her, Jodie approached me in the bar to ask how she could help herself to improve. I told her to try to see herself at a distance, and as much as possible to view her performance without emotion.

This is a very hard thing to do, even for a seasoned performer, and I think it was advice that was applicable to us on the panel, too. When I give my feedback, I try to frame it in a way that makes it clear I’m not judging the performer as a person; I’m judging their work. I may be saying ‘you’re not right for this job’,
⁷
but it’s because of the performance, not the individual. Working in showbiz means facing and accepting rejection, and it’s the toughest lesson to learn.

On Saturday nights before airtime, all the judges would gather for a confab before going on, and we’d prep ourselves for what might happen if each girl on the show failed or succeeded. We’d draft out a rough response that related to whatever points or challenges we might have given her earlier performances. I took very seriously the aspect of the show that expected development in the performers, and this meant I paid attention to whatever the other judges and I had said in the past.

Since we didn’t know what was going to happen, we had to be ready for both eventualities: the good and the bad. The show was live, and in live television there’s no time after a performance for a judge to stare blankly into space because he or she was gobsmacked by the success or the failure of a contestant. A performer may have a great dress rehearsal, but things can change in a heartbeat when you’re in front of a live studio and television audience, and it often did.

During those pre-show meetings, I began to get the impression that Cameron and Andrew were pushing a bit harder for Jessie Buckley. At this point in the series, about midway, I had not really made up my mind yet. It wasn’t until the semi-finals, when I started to see enough growth in people, that I began to think seriously about which performer could carry a West End show.

The reasons, in the end, that I didn’t support Jessie were that I didn’t see enough maturation in her performances, and I thought she was too young to play Nancy. I also suspected that she might not be able to handle the leadership that a leading lady would be expected to demonstrate and, to be honest, I saw limited emotional depth in her repertoire.

For example, when Jessie was singing an emotive song, she’d raise her hand and touch her forehead to suggest she was feeling something. She would do this quite deliberately. Lots of performers have a trait or a small movement that becomes part of their onstage persona. For example, Carol Burnett always tugs her ear at the end of her performances, and in
Tonight’s the Night
, when I stepped down from my ‘illuminated ring’,
⁸
I always did a spin at the front of the stage. Neither one of these rituals is an emotional move. Acting is about making the emotion seem real and if, to convey that feeling, an actor relies only on a superficial, choreographed move, it lessens the impact.

Having said all that, Jessie did have her good points. She was gorgeous, had charisma and she had a great voice. What Jessie, and a few other Nancy contestants, also needed, however, was a lesson in how to walk in high heels. At John Barrowman’s Beauty, Charm and
Confidence School, this would be one of the first required courses. For this, I believe, is an important life lesson for women.
⁹

I worry, I really do, that with so many younger women wearing flip-flops and flats these days – including my niece Clare, who has more pairs of flip-flops than anyone I know – walking correctly in heels will become a lost art. How tragic that would be! That’s why, when Clare was old enough to wear high heels, I gave her lessons in how to walk in them. Heel first. Weight on hips. Back straight. Strut. She can walk in any inch heel now and never looks as if she’s going to topple. Clare put her learning into action when she walked the red carpet with me at the New York premiere of
De-Lovely
, the Cole Porter biopic I filmed with Kevin Kline, and she strutted her heels with my co-star Ashley Judd like a pro. Jessie and a couple of the other Nancy contestants took advantage of my special skills in this area.
¹⁰

As the series progressed, it became obvious to me that Cameron wanted Jessie to win. Of the four finalists, while he loved Sam, he felt she was too immature to take on the role. He said he would be happy with any of the other three women winning the part – Jodie, Jessie or Rachel – but it was apparent that Jessie was his first choice to be Nancy.

During the contest, Cameron did not want Ashley Russell to move forward. He really liked her offstage, but onstage he found that her performances grated on him, and that she was unable, somehow, to communicate her sparkling offstage personality through her songs. I liked Ashley too – both on- and offstage – but she lost my support as Nancy in the end because she just wasn’t progressing as much as I would have liked, or even as much as some of the other performers.

But one of the funniest aspects of Cameron’s dissatisfaction with Ashley was that Andrew’s children had sussed this out. Any time they were within earshot of Cameron, Denise or I would yell, ‘Who are you voting for?’ and Andrew’s kids would reply loudly, ‘Ashley! We love her!’

On the fourth show of the series, Ashley and Francesca Jackson were in the bottom two after the audience voting. Cameron must have been thinking this was it; now Ashley would surely be gone. He was wrong and, unfortunately, I bore the brunt of his wrath.

One of the things I admire about Andrew in this kind of context
¹¹
is that sometimes if Denise or I were strong in our opinions and we had compelling evidence to support them, Andrew listened to us. A lot of times, especially when we were witnessing an amazing performance, we’d all confer across the panel with our eyes. On this particular night, Andrew watched, listened, and chose to save Ashley.

I came offstage and directly into a confrontation with Cameron. In general, I don’t let people rim me out in anger, but if it’s really warranted, I might bite my tongue. In this case, Cameron was furious that Ashley had been saved and he seemed to hold me partly responsible.

After the closing credits, Cameron stormed off the set. I thought we’d had a terrific show with lots of drama, and impressive vocal performances. We were making
I’d Do Anything
for the viewers – not Cameron – so they could pick a Nancy who they’d want to pay their hard-earned cash to see.

Speaking of which, even before the semi-final, the box-office advance for
Oliver!
was huge; two-thirds of the advance bookings came from people who did not even know who exactly was going to play Nancy – they may have booked hoping for Jessie, Jodie, Rachel or Sam – which just goes to demonstrate the calibre of the contestants.
Oliver!
also starred Rowan Atkinson as Fagin, who was clearly a massive draw. By the time the show opened, in January 2009, the stellar cast – Jodie as Nancy, Burn Gorman
¹²
as Bill Sikes, plus Rowan and many other fantastic performers – had attracted phenomenal box-office receipts in the region of £15 million.