TWO of my favourite cultural forms are the newspaper column and the stage musical.
They’re very different, of course, with one being a kind of one-person show and the other being an ensemble endeavour.
There aren’t usually characters in newspaper columns, unless you count the (sometimes exaggerated) character of the columnist themselves.
It’s true for me, as a columnist: the Ian McMillan I become in the columns is, to a certain extent, an almost fictionised version of me in that I sometimes rearrange reality to make it fit the column.
It’s just me, though – there are no co-stars, there’s no love interest, there’s no real climax unless you count the moment when the column is actually sent off. There’s something addictive about a newspaper column, however, just as there’s something addictive about the stage musical, and I love them both but try as I might I can’t really imagine places where they could possibly meet.
Most crucially there are no songs and no dances in a column, unless you count the songs I sometimes burst into as I’m writing, because I (wrongly) believe they might aid my concentration, and unless you count the dances I do when I’ve completed a particularly fine sentence. On the whole, though, it does seem that the column and the musical will never meet.
They’re too far apart in terms of form and structure and shape.
Until today, that is. Welcome to Column! The first ever column/musical hybrid. And the exclamation mark in ‘Column!’ is of course deliberate because nothing tells you that a musical is going to be full of fizz and sparkle like an exclamation mark!
You can stick an exclamation mark on the end of any word or set of words and you’ll have the beguiling and exciting title of a musical. Try a few phrases from around the borough as possible titles for a hit stage musical: It’s Bin Day! Am Not Gerrin A Seeason Ticket Next Year! Av Just Missed Bus!
Shhh: the musical that’s also a column is starting in a minute. Overture and beginners please. The orchestra play a rousing tune that somehow manages to mirror the sound of the tapping on a keyboard as the musical and the column are both written at the same time.
The curtains open to reveal a white-haired man sitting at a laptop and staring into space; this is our hero, Ian McMillan, about to write his fortnightly Barnsley Chronicle column.
Now a musical is normally full of action and plot but, let’s face it, the writing of a column isn’t. Person sits down, person writes column, person gets up from chair and goes to make a cup of tea, person comes back and completes column.
Well, if that’s all I’ve got to work with then here goes. The white-haired man (that’s me, of course) turns to the audience and begins to sing ‘two of my favourite cultural forms, I mean two of my favourite cultural forms, I said two of my favourite cultural forms are the newspaper column and the stage musical…’
Yes, this isn’t really a column about somebody writing a musical, it’s an attempt to write a musical in column form, and a column in musical form. And, as I’m discovering as I attempt to marry two unreconcilable forms, it’s not easy.
There would be an easy way out, I guess, which would be to just get a choir to sing the column but that isn’t in any way a musical, is it?
Somehow, within the wide space that’s afforded by the staging of a musical and the narrow space that’s afforded by the placing and replacing of words on a page, there must be room for this new form, the Colomusical.
Hold on a minute: the music is rising and the white-haired man in standing up to deliver a big number, and I don’t mean a big number of words for the column.
The white-haired man (me, played by a dark-haired actor in a wig) sings ‘I’m stuck, and I can’t think of owt to put’ which is one of things that Ian McMillan often thinks as he writes his Chronicle column,and then, like people often do in musicals, he repeats the words many, many times: ‘I’m stuck, and I can’t think of owt to put, I’m stuck, and I can’t think owt to put’.
Come on everyone, join in! We’ll crack this Colomusical thing yet!
