I Am What I Am by John Barrowman (white hot kiss .TXT) 📕

when, a couple of months after Cameron’s rant at me during I’d Do Anything, he offered me one of the biggest deals in the West End: the lead in Barnum. Oh, man, I really wanted to do it.

Barnum would have been a great musical to showcase my voice and my talents, what with its unique blend of music, comedy, drama and the razzle-dazzle of the circus. The Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart musical first opened on Broadway in 1980, and in the West End the next year. The plot follows the life of the innovative entrepreneur and outspoken entertainer P. T. Barnum, and his ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ as it travels from city to city.

Cameron had a lot of terrific ideas about making his revival more modern and accessible to today’s theatre audiences. His production would be more in the style of Cirque du Soleil, with acrobats and high wires, rather than three rings with lions and tigers and bears.7 What would have been really brilliant about playing Barnum was that I would have gone to circus school in Amsterdam, to learn the ins and outs of being a Big Top leader. Can you imagine me on a high wire? Doing a double backflip? In a ring with a whip?8

However, the more I thought about the details and the planning and the schedules of such a project, the more I realized that, at this point in my career, when there are so many new things I still want to do, I couldn’t devote so much time to one single venture. If I were to return to theatre for a new show, I’d have to be with the production for a full year’s run. That would be fair and reasonable. At that particular time, I couldn’t and didn’t want to commit to a full year of anything.

While I was negotiating with Cameron, I was also in meetings with the BBC, brainstorming the format for Tonight’s the Night. As that dream was moving closer to reality, I finally had to admit that I’d have to give up Barnum.

I didn’t relinquish it without a fight, though. At one point, I was so desperate to try to get my schedule to work that I even considered doing a variety show and a West End production at the same time.9 But it would have been completely unreasonable of me to expect that Cameron would give me Saturday nights off from the theatre so that I could spend the time on television. There was no way I could do both.

To do or not to do Barnum was an emotionally difficult decision for me to make. My life as an entertainer began in the theatre, and being an entertainer has always been more than a career choice for me: my double helix is a treble clef in a belt with sparkles. In the end, I had to say ‘no’ to Barnum. But no matter how heavy this ‘no’ weighed on me, no matter how difficult and disappointing, it was also, in some quiet way, affirming that all the career decisions and choices I’d made to date were paying off – because I was in a position, professionally, where I could say ‘no’ to a West End show, to say nothing of the thrill of being on the verge of launching my very own prime-time variety TV show.

If you’re single and, say, between eighteen and twenty-five, it’s unlikely that anything on the telly will keep you home on a Saturday night, but if you’re my age,10 you’re married with children, or you’re in my parents’ generation, then sitting down to watch something light and entertaining on a Saturday night is exactly what you want from your licence fee.

In preparation for our initial meetings with BBC Entertainment, who are just the best at coming up with successful Saturday-night shows, Gav and I spent hours on the web and YouTube, researching the people and programmes we personally might want to watch on a Saturday night. I’d jot down ideas, fragments of ideas, and details of fragments of ideas – anything I liked and thought was worth considering. After six months or so, we realized that – given the success of the BBC’s talent-search shows, and my own background as a performer – whatever the overall format turned out to be, a significant part of my Saturday-night show had to be performance-based.

My own performing dream came true in 1989, when I debuted in Anything Goes with Elaine Paige in the West End, and I believed this kind of programme was one way for me to give back a little. But you know what else? I think it’s really nice to do good things for good people, and to see them have a chance to experience something that, for whatever reason, hasn’t happened for them.

Good television is not only about what you see on the screen, it’s also about what you don’t see behind the scenes. The team working on Tonight’s the Night was great and we all worked well together, collaborating with ease and with the purpose of a shared vision. Moira Ross,11 the show’s executive producer and our boss, was very experienced in the entertainment field, having produced Dancing with the Stars for American TV and Last Choir Standing for the BBC, among others. Mel Balac was the series producer and the one who talked into my ear during the Sunday-night recordings of the show,12 and who’d done all three of the Andrew Lloyd Webber programmes with me.13 Funnily enough, Mel also produced the Barrowman family14 when we appeared on All Star Family Fortunes.

Finally, Martin Scott was the third executive producer on Tonight’s the Night. He represented BBC In-House Entertainment and oversaw the entire production on behalf of the channel. I’d worked with him on all the BBC entertainment shows I’d ever done. Martin’s a veteran of Strictly Come Dancing and the ALW talent searches, as well as lots of others.

Every series also needs runners and assistants. In fact, television