Editor's note: Alex Horne Presents The Horne Section returns for its second series at 19:15 on Sunday 24th February with special guest star Danny Baker. Here, comic and band leader Alex Horne explains how the six-part musical spectacular was written by the group.
Almost all of this series was written in a hovel near Milton Keynes. In fact, it was written in the Hovel near Milton Keynes; a barn on a farm in Wing that Ben, the practical drummer, had rented for the first week of 2013.
We all arrived with assorted Christmas presents, hangovers and a handful of ideas in the wild hope that these would somehow transform into a full-blown six-part music and comedy radio show.
Thankfully there are six of us, and a problem sixthed is a much less of a problem. If someone had come up with a chorus for a song, someone else was usually able to provide the verse; Ed and Ben volunteered to take on the jingles and Joe and Will bashed their heads together until they’d made a couple of surprisingly tender duets. Meanwhile Mark had come up with a cracking song called Shampoo Promises so I got online to discover just what shampoo bottles do promise these days. We made progress in the hovel.
Like some sort of senior detective, I’d set up a post-it note material system on one of the walls of the kitchen. This is still my greatest achievement of the year, possibly my life.
Alex Horne's 'achievement of the year'
Employing a system using both colour and shape of notes, and with fairly solid ideas for episode themes already sorted, we gradually filled each of the six shows with items we thought could possibly maybe work. We recorded half finished versions of tunes on our mobile phones and ate whatever food the surprisingly capable drummer cooked us. We were happy hamsters in our hovel.
Some ideas were bigger than simple singing. In the first episode, themed around Games, we definitely needed a running machine. I texted our producer Julia to warn her - she did not say no. In another show we absolutely had to have 300 carrots. Again, she didn’t seem completely opposed to the idea. A third idea necessitated a choir of eleven children… we decided not to mention that until nearer the time.
We also needed special guests, people we wanted to come and have fun with a live band, so we put together a list of talented, funny folk that we’d hero-worshipped from afar for years. Danny Baker was number one on my list, partly because I knew he loved his music, but mainly because I’d been given his autobiography for Christmas and was desperate to meet him. Matt Lucas and Phill Jupitus were also people we knew would get the show right away and would hopefully do things they don’t usually do in our unlikely set up. Then there were guys like Doc Brown, Nick Mohammed and Charlie Baker who we all knew and whom we were desperate to work with on the actual radio.
Incredibly - and I’m still surprised this has really now happened - they all said yes. Brilliant; five minutes less to write per episode.
For these spots, we asked the guests what they wanted to do first, then did our best to make that happen. And so we’ve got Danny and Phill banging out what have now become our favourite songs, Matt singing some classic George Dawes numbers for the very first time outside of Shooting Stars, a couple of raps from Doc, crooning from Charlie, and some desperately melancholic violin playing from Nick.
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Danny Baker s The Horne Section to perform the classic Tommy Steele number.
