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

I later learned from Gavin that he was in room 416.

CHAPTER TEN

‘O CANADA’

★

‘How do you solve a problem like a judge in jail?’

John Barrowman

Five things you should know about Toronto

1 You can take a ferry to an island and sunbathe nude (Canadians will sunbathe in snow flurries).

2 It’s not like America or the UK (it’s Canadaland!).

3 Safeguards and trust are important (especially when someone escapes via a hotel balcony).

4 When in Toronto, eat! (Food! Glorious food!)

5 I’ve looked at Falls from both sides now (the Canadian side is better).

In June and July 2008, I travelled back and forth between Canada, the US and the UK to be a judge on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) version of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? (I was working concurrently on a number of other commitments in Britain and the States.) Sometimes I flew weekly to Toronto and stayed – Thursday to Monday – in a condo in Yorkville.

On every trip across the Atlantic that summer, the plane hit some of the most violent thunderstorms I’ve ever experienced. I fly frequently. I know the signs. When the flight attendants buckle up, hold hands and begin to sing ‘Kumbaya’, the turbulence is going to be bad.

I loved everything about Toronto: the CN Tower, the great restaurants and, of course, the shopping.1 However, I found that very little of my previous work on the BBC talent-search shows prepared me for the high drama and outrageous behaviour2 that came with judging the Canadian Maria – especially when a Toronto jail ended up being alive with ‘The Sound of Music’.

To begin with, the Maria who was the favourite of the other judges was not my favourite. I thought she was too vanilla; too bland for the role. The young woman who eventually won, Elicia MacKenzie, was one of my choices because she had energy and passion, and she sang from her heart.

As I did in the BBC version of the Maria show, I went to Maria School to work with and to meet the contestants. Many of the hopefuls knew me from my musical-theatre work, but more of them were familiar with me from Torchwood and Doctor Who.3

During one of my first days on set, I was working on a theatrical exercise with the contestants, and I said something silly about being gay.4 Thanks to Clare, my niece, who was with me at the time,5 an off-the-cuff expression from that day became the Barrowman phrase of the summer. Clare, I might add here, can spread family gossip or stir up drama faster than Perez Hilton and TMZ combined. There’s some sentiment among my immediate family that she learned this trait from me. Never.

Anyway, I said something like: ‘I’m just as much a gay man in Canadaland as I am in England.’ And that was certainly true – I was on a CBC How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? float for the city’s gay-pride parade one week (can’t let a parade pass me by), and I discovered after only a few weekends in the city that Toronto is an open and very gay-friendly city.

Thanks to Clare, whenever anyone asked what John was doing that summer, the response was always, ‘He’s being gay in Canadaland.’

Unlike on the BBC talent shows, at the CBC, the panel of judges watched the Maria hopefuls on DVD in dress rehearsal before the live shows. This was not to pre-judge them, but to help the writers and the other judges – who had very little experience in this area – to craft a broad range of responses to each of the contestants’ performances. It also meant the production team could time out the various sections of the script with more accuracy.

In these script meetings, each of us would suggest the kinds of things we might say if the performance that evening was a strong or a weak one. Given this was now my fourth time on a judging panel, I was never at a loss for something constructive and TV-friendly to say. There was one particular judge, though, who, when it was her turn to comment, would hem and haw and then finally say something like, ‘Oh, I’ll probably just tell her she’s good,’ or ‘I’ll probably say I liked what she did.’

Every time. When the show was down to its last six or so contestants, I couldn’t help myself. On behalf of all talent-show judges everywhere, I gently lost it.

‘Stop being so nice. Stop being so Canadian. This is a contest. If she’s rubbish, then tell her she’s rubbish.’

One night during the live show, she made a comment suggesting a particular contestant, Donna Lajeunesse, had too much of an ‘attitude’. I thought this was wrong of her. It’s one thing to comment on a person’s performance; yet another to comment on their personality.

First of all, if Donna did have some kind of ‘attitude’, if she was causing some discontent among the other contestants, then that conflict should have been worked out when she was at Maria School. The judge didn’t need to humiliate her on live TV and perhaps bias the audience towards her. Donna looked perfect as an Austrian Fräulein, and she belted out her numbers with spirit and style. Anyway, the judge ragged on her attitude, calling her a ‘diva’, and commenting how she was badly behaved and how this kind of behaviour can’t be tolerated in theatre … blah, blah, blah.

Originally, the producers had decided they weren’t going to come back to me for my comments after this judge had shared her opinion, but I planned to cut in quickly at a moment when she took a breath. During Barrowman family dinners, sometimes the only way you can get your say is to leap into the fray of the conversation when someone breathed. So I was ready when I heard this judge inhale.

‘Sometimes when you’re a diva,’ I said, ‘you’re perceived as a bitch, but over