I’m waiting to be picked up in the lovely company van right now, Rob has been delayed so I thought I’d get a new blog in!
So, when I last left you, I was heading for Pizza Hut! I had a fabulous night, so a quick thank-you to everyone who came. Caroline and I had a lovely night with all of you! And thank you for the lovely and yummy birthday presents!!
So that was Wednesday... I spent Thursday with my lovely friends Corinne and Mari in London town. Camden to be precise. A fabulous day was spent shopping, and a fantastic evening at KOKO watching the gorgeous Jack Savoretti and Newton Faulkner.
Of course all of this fun and frivolity meant that myself and Mari missed an evening of rehearsals for Starlight’s big television audition! Therefore, my Friday afternoon (well, half an hour of it) was spent in Jacc’s front room learning new routines and trying to find a harmony line for me to sing!
Then Friday night rolled around and we trotted off to the final rehearsal. 24 of us rolled into the room and we set about doing our thing. Due to not being able to rehearse at our usual location, we rehearsed in a party room at Kettering’s Kids Kingdom! Cue half the cast running to play on all of the kids play things as soon as they arrived!
The rehearsal went really well, we managed to get some cracking harmonies going, and I even managed to do the whole routines correctly by the end of the 3 hours!
As is the norm on a Friday night whenever I’m in town, I took Jacc home and ended up staying for a couple of hours, this time rehearsing and making sure everyone had the relevant paperwork ready for the morning.
I left around midnight, and tried to sleep, but through sheer nervousness and excitement, and ridiculously hot temperatures, I didn’t manage to nod off for another 2 hours.
6.45am rolled around, the alarm went off, and I jumped in the shower, trying to wake myself up for the long day ahead. Jacc had demanded that I should be at his for 8am (ugh!) so that we could go over final preparations and rehearsals before meeting everyone at 9am at the train station.
If you’ve ever tried rehearsing vocals at 8am in the morning you’ll know it’s a bit of a struggle, so needless to say, we were a bit rubbish!
I was shocked to see that everyone had made it to the train station by 9.10am, and at 9.27am, we were off! I had a lovely giggle with the girls on the first train, chatting about how excited we were, and comparing our ridiculous answers on our 5-page long questionnaires sent to us by the production team! After a swift train change, the second leg of the journey was spent rehearsing our harmonies (much to the horror of our fellow passengers who actually moved seats!) and listening to the songs of ‘glee’ with Caroline!
And then came Birmingham! Jacc marched us out of the station with expert precision, and we started to make our 41-minute walk to the dance school with thanks to Google Maps on Jacc’s iPhone. I’m not going to lie, and I don’t want to be rude, but we did walk through some rough areas! I was a bit concerned that a few people weren’t keeping up, and that we’d lose them, but eventually we found the correct street. After following the iPhone to the correct postcode, we couldn’t find the building. A friendly taxi driver saw a big gang of dancers looking lost and asked where we were going. As soon as the words ‘Mosely Dance Centre’ were out of our mouths, two heads popped out of upper-floor windows and said in unison, “It’s round here!!”
We were literally 5 seconds away from it, right in our faces and none of us had spotted it! We walked around the corner and realised that we were 50 minutes early for our registration time. One of the boys spotted a patch of grass over the road, so we made our way over and began to sit down for a nice spot of lunch, courtesy of the local Greggs!
As soon as we had sat down, an attractive young man walked out of the dance centre and asked if we were there for the audition. He told us that a group had dropped out (hoorah- less competition!) and that we could go in earlier.
Over the road we went again, registered each person, which took forever due to our number, but could have been worse had it not been for Jacc’s and my organisational skills the night before! After a quick solo photograph being taken of each member, we were then directed to a small waiting room where we had a group photo and a chat by the same lovely man! (Eddie?!)
Jacc was taken away to be interviewed on camera, and he took Jemma and Ruben with him as the oldest and youngest so that they could get a variety of opinions. I was so glad he didn’t take me with him, I’m rubbish on camera... Bodes well for my Neighbours attempt doesn’t it!?!
While they were being chatted to, Eddie and a very pretty lady came round the rest of us and asked us questions about ourselves, Starlight, and Jacc! For some reason they were very interested in our hobbies and seemed a little disappointed when none of us could come up with anything other than performing! (Although the pretty lady was very pleased to find out that I am a professional actress!)
After our chats, we were shown upstairs and given 15 minutes of rehearsal time. Well, the lovely Eddie said 15 minutes but it was more like 25. We almost made it through 2 runs of each song when we were called downstairs to the audition room.
The panel consisted of 4 people, one lady and 3 men, 2 were producers, one vocal coach and one choreographer. The choreographer and male producer were gorgeous, no need for fake smiles in this audition! Jacc introduced us, and told them what we were going to perform, and then we were off! Jacc had explained that our Joseph Megamix was 8 minutes long, and they told us that they might stop us, but to just go with it. And so we did!
The Joseph megamix went really well... in the end they stopped us after about 6 minutes but we had delivered them some cracking harmonies and dance routines, plus a little taster of our acting abilities. Then came Skid Rom from Little Shop of Horrors. We had a quick costume adding session, in which Caroline got her hair stuck in her zip and ran around screaming! The song went really well, I wasn’t sure my harmony line went really well but the panel really seemed to enjoy it.
They told Jacc that he had done a beautiful job with us and we gave him a little round of applause! We had been told that we might be asked to do some extra things after our pieces but they just said thank you and we were done! We had to hang around outside for a few minutes and wait for one of the ladies in charge to come and explain the next stages if we got through, which gave us time to check out a few other groups in the competition. Who knows if it matters, but we were much more professional in our approach and ridiculously well-organised compared to them!
And then we made our journey home. Jacc made me a lovely gingerbread man with my nickname on it (see above!) A lovely ticket collector on the first train made friends with us and even made an announcement over the train tannoy wishing us luck for the future which was lovely!
We rolled back into Kettering around 5-ish, ridiculously tired but buzzing and pleased with our performance, and with Caroline in her Skid Row old lady costume, complete with rain hood, much to the bewilderment of other train passengers!
Now we play the waiting game, we find out in the next 2 weeks if we’ve got through. Sadly I can’t announce it on here if we do get through, as we have been sworn to secrecy until it has been publicly released!
But, a big congratulations and good luck to Jacc, Kurt, Tara, Karolina, Lauren, Vicki, Georgie, Audrey, Olivia, James, Josh Pugh, Simmo, Mari, Jemma, Ruben, Caroline, Paige, Patch, Laura, Jo, Chloe, Ashley, J-Pick and me(!), I have everything crossed for us! Even if we don’t get through, we should all be so proud of ourselves for coming this far! Well done guys! Go team Starlight! x x x
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