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

own, pretty slick moves. Bennie’s deep, deep lunges and knee-high kicks had all the fluidity of a three-year-old trying to skip.

After Sam arrived and was seated with her friends and fellow judges, the hit began. We’d recruited two people to play actors interested in auditioning and they performed first. I could tell by Sam’s responses to them that she had no clue she was being set up.

Then Bennie stepped out to centre stage. Man, I was so bad that I was really good. I’d hardly opened my mouth and I’d only completed one of my groovy moves, but I could already see Sam struggling desperately not to laugh. After all, this was some poor man trying his very best to get a part in her local production. Bless his heart. When I’d finished, the applause was polite. Then Sam did her best to let me know gently that ‘she’d be in touch’. I interrupted her.

‘Do you think you can do this any better?’ I asked, in an accent that sounded a lot like the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show.

She was a bit taken aback, even more so when Bennie stepped off the stage – not very gracefully, given his really tight trousers and his towering boots – and he … I walked right up to the audition table. She started to look back and forth among her colleagues for some assistance. None was forthcoming. At that moment, while she was blustering an answer to Bennie, I tore off the moustache, beard and wig,24 and revealed myself.

Her facial expression was a mix of about twenty-two competing emotions that ended in sheer delight. ‘Oh! Oh! I can’t believe it’s you … It’s John Barrowman.’

But what Sam said next has remained one of the funnier lines of any of the hits I participated in. I asked her if she knew why I was at her am-dram auditions.

Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘Because you’ve finally decided you can’t live without me.’

These surprise hits were one of the best parts of the show to film – not only because of meeting and doing something special for people like Sam, but also because the hits gave me the opportunity to get out of the studio, to improvise, and to dress up. Most of all, though, I loved the drama and the emotion of the reveal.

There was no irony involved, no mocking, and no parody in Tonight’s the Night. I wanted the show to be Sam’s special night, or whoever else’s dream we made come true. The rest of us were simply sharing the spotlight.

When Sam joined us in London to prepare to sing with the cast of Mamma Mia!, she met the cast at the Prince of Wales Theatre, she was given rehearsal time with them and with Paul, our choreographer, and she was given some of the best vocal training in the West End from Claire Moore, who was in Miss Saigon with me in the early nineties. I trust Claire’s ear and her heart, and it was her job to work with all the performers and help them to sound the best that they possibly could.

My call time to the BBC studios on Saturday mornings was early, because the day before we taped in front of a live audience, we had what’s called a ‘camera rehearsal’. These camera rehearsals were more complicated than the ones I described in an earlier table talk, but they essentially served the same function: to make sure everyone knew their positions and had rehearsed the flow of the show.25 On TTN, the camera rehearsal was a full dress rehearsal for all of us, as well as a chance for the director and his crew to figure out camera positions. Perhaps most importantly, for the performers whose wishes were being fulfilled, it was a chance for them to get comfortable on the set and to rehearse on the stage with lights, music … and me.

The camera rehearsal can take all day and well into the evening. The most difficult part of this day was keeping focused when there was so much chatter and commotion, and while the crew were constantly moving around. Given the chaos, I tried to keep the mood light and to have some fun.26

While I was rehearsing ‘Boogie Wonderland’ for one of the shows’ opening numbers, I did my signature turn and then sang the first part of the song while doing my impression of Shakira – which wasn’t half bad and cracked everyone up. When I shifted into Patti LuPone for the last half of the number, however, the laughter dropped to polite tittering because only Gav, Carole and Claire, our vocal coach, actually knew who I was mimicking. Oh, those television people.

Midway through taping the series of shows, Gav, Mel, Mo and I made a decision to cut a segment that the audience enjoyed and I really liked participating in, but which was taking up far too much of my time during the week. The segment was called ‘Stage Fright’, and it involved me competing against a celebrity in a performance smackdown during the live taping. One week, I learned how to fire-toss – and managed to singe most of the hair off my lower arm in practice. Another week, I trained to be a freestyle footballer. I was rubbish at dribbling the ball, but I did master a couple of tricks, including taking my shirt off while keeping a ball27 balanced between my shoulder blades.

On Sunday, the studio audience is seated between 5.30 and 6 p.m. (which usually meant Scott dashed into his seat at 6.15 p.m.). This became one of my favourite moments on a Sunday: standing in the wings having my mic adjusted, my make-up touched up, and watching yesterday’s craziness morph into … maybe not calm, but certainly a cool professionalism. The studio felt electric and alive with the energy from the band, the crew, the other performers and the audience, and when I stepped onstage, the energy ratcheted