A Rugby Musical Spectacular

“We can call it ‘Gareth Charles – The Musical’!”

Those were the words of Steve Austins, Editor Radio Wales in April this year. They made as much sense to me then as they’re probably making to you right now but let me try and explain.

Every year, BBC Radio Wales gets the chance to work closely with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. It’s always an exciting opportunity. Previous projects have seen the radio station take over the orchestra for a day and last year we put on a special concert with Mike Peters, front man of rock group The Alarm, who performed to orchestral arrangements of some of the band’s classic hits.

This time around we decided that it would be good to do something around the time of the Rugby World Cup, particularly the England/Wales match which is always a popular fixture with our audience.

We talked about trying to recreate the atmosphere of the last time Wales beat England in a spectacular 30-3 drubbing that clinched the Six Nations Championship for Wales in 2013, snatching the Grand Slam from England in the process. The atmosphere in the Millennium Stadium that day was exciting, intense and emotional, resulting in a particularly memorable and passionate commentary from our chief rugby correspondent Gareth Charles. Steve suggested setting some of those clips to music which would be performed by the orchestra.

I was tasked with developing ‘Gareth Charles – The Musical’ further.

It soon became apparent that just playing some radio commentary whilst an orchestra performed probably wouldn’t be the most scintillating thing for an audience to sit through. I started looking into using the TV pictures from that day too.

The piece also needed a narrator to tell the story of that day and I decided that Eddie Butler, former captain of Wales, eminent broadcaster and journalist, would be ideal to write the script.

Calling on the distant memories of my music degree I collated a list of suitably epic (and accessible) classical music that included Wagner’s ‘Ride Of the Valkyries’ and Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. I collected a few choice phrases that had been penned by Eddie for some of his newspaper articles and recorded them in a rough approximation (certainly NOT an impersonation!) of his voice to demonstrate how the finished piece might sound with a mixture of music, commentary and narration.

It sounded great. The only problem now was that Eddie knew nothing about the project – yet. It took less than 3 minutes to sell the idea to him and he seemed genuinely excited to be involved.

Next we needed a film to show the audience who would be attending the event. I wanted it to have the same glossy, high production values which are associated with our Sport department’s output and I was allocated Chris Howells, one of their producers, who also had a musical background.

Over the next few weeks Chris worked with Eddie and put together a 20 minute film that didn’t just tell the story of that historic day, it also investigated the historic rivalry between the two teams.

Musical scores were hired by the orchestra and additional players were drafted in – apparently some of the pieces required a larger orchestra than normal!

We released tickets to the performance and they sold out almost straight away. I found my days starting to be taken up with discussions about big screens, lighting rigs, set dressing, and a host of other things you wouldn’t normally come across in an average radio production. In addition to this, Radio Wales’ digital team were filming the event for our website. They had 6 cameras set up that they were going to edit into a visual spectacular to accompany the radio programme.

By now this project, that had started as such a simple proposition, had grown into one of the most complicated projects I’d ever produced. We basically had a live orchestra trying to play along to a film that required them to hit certain points at specific times. In addition to this we had a live narrator who also had to hit certain points without crashing into excerpts of commentary that were on the film.

This made things particularly difficult for the guest conductor on the day, Kenneth Woods. If the orchestra played too fast or too slow they would be out of sync with the film. In the end, we had to give him an audio feed of the original guide track of music that we’d used to edit the film. He had this fed to his headphones and then had to keep the orchestra performing live at the same speed as the recording on the video tape – a musical equivalent of rubbing your head whilst patting your stomach!

Performance day arrived and I had a last minute crisis of confidence. Suddenly, on paper, the whole project seemed absolutely ridiculous and impossible! A further issue that came to light during rehearsals was the volume of the orchestra in relation to Eddie’s narration and Gareth’s commentary clips. Parts of Holst’s ‘Mars’ require the orchestra playing at full blast and they were in danger of drowning everything else out.

I needn’t have worried. I had a fantastic technical team with me who dealt with every issue that arose and after only two full run-throughs of the film we were ready to go.

The audience arrived, dressed in rugby regalia as we’d requested. The majority wore rugby shirts but there were also a few daffodil heads and face-painted dragons. People were treating this like a proper rugby match!

The first half of the evening was a straight forward concert. The orchestra played ‘musical representations’ of some of the countries Wales might meet on their way to the Rugby World Cup Final and then it was time for the main piece.

In the control room we had a collection of producers and engineers, each one controlling and cueing different parts of the production. The orchestra started the first bars of Vaughan Williams ‘Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis’ and we were up and running.

The recording went without a hitch. Eddie and the orchestra were faultless. The audience behaved like they were at a rugby match, singing along with the National Anthem and cheering and clapping whenever a try or kick went over even chanting ‘Wales, Wales, Wales’ at one point.

I spoke to several members of the audience afterwards but for me the show’s success was summed up by one older gent who told me that he’d never been to a rugby match before but now, having attended this, felt like he had. Job done!

You can hear Eddie Butler’s World Cup Warm Up at 9pm on Friday 25th September, and 1pm/6.40pm on Saturday 26th September on BBC Radio Wales and for 30 days after broadcast on BBC iPlayer Radio.

The film of the event is an iPlayer Exclusive which can be viewed on BBC iPlayeruntil Friday 2nd October.