The Perkins code of conduct (From The Argus)

The Perkins code of conduct

12:40pm Saturday 6th February 2010

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The noble art of conducting appears a faintly silly one to most of us. Waving a stick about, giving musicians deranged, gurning stares, and ostentatiously flicking back one’s hair at the climax of a soaring crescendo has always looked like a pretty easy way to make a living.

If you saw the BBC’s Maestro, however – in which a gaggle of celebrity novices picked up the baton – you’ll have been given a glimpse of the focus, skill and slightly unhinged determination that lies behind the job. While hardly the kind of labour required of a Victorian chimney sweep, serious graft was demanded from each of the celebs, including eventual winner Sue Perkins, as they struggled to get to grips with their new discipline.

After earning the opportunity to conduct Elgar and Verdi in front of a nausea-inducing 35,000 people at Hyde Park at the close of the series, Perkins is now preparing to take the BBC Concert Orchestra through an infinitely more challenging, two-hour one-night-only performance in Chichester.

“This is much more daunting,” she explains. “In Hyde Park everyone’s up for a good time and gets carried away. To be honest, if I’d made huge mistakes it wouldn’t have mattered because the orchestra’s capable of performing without me waving in their face, and everyone is singing along.

“Now I’m doing two hours or so and it’s complicated music, so I’m truly terrified. But it’ll be an interesting gambit for the audience if they actually get through it.”

Delicately articulate and beautifully spoken, Perkins’s shyness in conversation is some remove from the impish jabs she delivers to food writer Giles Coren on the pair’s BBC Three Supersize... programmes, and there’s a sense she’s very serious indeed about this new vocation.

“I’d love to do more. If someone had said to me at 18 that I could do this for a living I wouldn’t have thought about anything else. It’s the most comprehensively engaging thing I’ve ever done. You’re thinking and feeling, your brain’s running like a computer trying to work out what’s coming next, and all the while this huge body of sound is belting through your body...it’s an absolutely extraordinary feeling.

“To be able to sculpt sound and refashion a piece of music in the way you want to hear it is amazing. It’s like having an iPod and thinking ‘I wish they could do that a bit faster’, and then it is faster.”

Her already taut nerves are being stretched further by the programme for the evening, built around music that’s carried particular resonance for her throughout her life, including music her parents played when she was growing up, such as Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Chichester audiences may well be thankful the Perkins family had the taste they did... I can only imagine the look of collective horror etched on the faces of the BBC Concert Orchestra as they realised they’d be exploring the back- catalogue of my dad’s cherished Lionel Richie.

“It’s kind of a compendium of music I’ve been listening to since I was about five and where I am now. There’s some Shostakovich, Stravinsky, some Benjamin Britten and some Bruch. I might also be doing some audience participation – but I don’t want to give it away – and it’ll be linked together with some jokes and storytelling.”

Over the course of the Maestro series, Perkins showed a real knack for engaging the musicians, and says she’s come to understand how important a skill this is in leading an orchestra. Since the show, she’s conducted the London Gay Symphony Orchestra through Danny Elfman’s Simpsons Theme and the William Tell Overture.

“I suppose conducting’s a bit like group sex... you need to make sure everyone’s having a good time and everyone’s being taken care of. It’s not about showboating and being a performer because they’re musicians and not performers. It’s about being part of a team and making sure everyone feels they’ve created a perfect piece of music and it’s profound in some way.

“And I do a lot of eye-balling. I’m usually really shy and I don’t look anyone in the eye, but for some reason when I’m conducting I’m able to really look at people. I don’t know what that’s about...”

Given her reinvigorated knowledge of music (she does hold an A-level in the subject), it seems a logical step that Perkins’s next TV project should take the much-caricatured world of the brass band as its focus. Forever synonymous with cloth caps, whippets and kestrel taming in the Southern imagination, Perkins says this uniquely British musical form is going the same way as the heavy industry that once sustained it. Three decades ago, there was a sumptuous 35,000 registered brass bands in Britain, compared with today’s withered total of about 700.

“It’s very much about community music-making and how that’s fallen off the radar. It’s a celebration of community spirit, community music and the individuals who stick it out week in, week out. It’s basically a plea saying we may have lost our manufacturing base, the mines may no longer be there, but let’s not lose the culture of music-making and creativity around that.”

The BBC’s press release for Band Of Britain optimistically notes it hopes to do for brass bands what Strictly has done for ballroom dancing, but Perkins says it’s as much about the people involved as the form.

“Its trying to keep that spirit of the workforce alive, even if they’re not physically there any more. There’s something very warm and patriotic about that sound – it’s very evocative, and the people I met were inspirational. I really adored them.”

At just 23, soon after her graduation from Cambridge University, Perkins and comedy partner Mel Giedroyc were proving to be a precocious double talent, writing for Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders before stepping in front of the camera on their own terms.

More recently, Perkins has been on top form in the Supersize... series, which sees her and Giles Coren immerse themselves in the diets, clothing and behaviour of our Edwardian, Restoration and Elizabethan forebears.

Always game for a daft haircut or an organ-crushing period costume, Perkins has served as something of a cipher for women and their treatment throughout the ages. A new series, which starts filming in March, will go some way to re-enacting a much-loved sitcom.

“It’s going to be based on The Good Life [in which Richard Briers and the delectable Felicity Kendall become subsistence allotment holders in Surbiton]. So we’ll be bickering over some courgettes, I should imagine.

“There’s actually a lot of love between Giles and I. Politically, we’re poles apart, but it’s a marriage of opposites and we’re very fond of each other.”

The show seems particularly pertinent in an age which has seen the chattering classes gravitate ever closer to ethically-sourced produce and the slow food movement. When filming is finished, Perkins may or may not continue work on a long-gestating book.

“I’m always writing a book, but it’ll never be published because I’ll never finish it,” she says.

“Every time I start thinking I’ll sit down and write it something more interesting comes along. Or I’ll make a cup of tea or a friend turns up... but I’d love to at some point. Don’t hold your breath, though, you’ll end up in casualty.”

* Sue Perkins conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra at Chichester Festival Theatre on Thursday, February 18. Tickets, priced £10-£30, are available on 01243 781312 or by visiting www.cft.org.uk

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