Tired of being the little assistant, Alex Horne finally has the chance to pitch his very own TV show to Channel 4. Having been granted permission by Greg Davies, Alex wants to be the leading man of a new late night music chat show, The Horne Section TV Show, filmed live from his family home.
With the help of his loyal and much more talented band, The Horne Section, the group do their best to impress the big bosses at Channel 4. Luckily for them, Alex's wife's friend Thora (Desiree Burch) takes pity on them, stepping in at the last minute as the show's reluctant producer. With her help, they make it to air, despite Channel 4 exec Ash (Georgia Tennant) being generally obstructive, novice TV researcher Lucy (Camille Ucan) looking at her phone, flustered intern runner Nelly (Tim Mahendren) attempting to levitate, and John Oliver being the only person desperate to be on the show.
Hoping to make it a series to remember, they set the stage for special guest appearances from Martin Kemp, Big Zuu, Imogen Heap, Anneka Rice, and Dr Ranj Singh who join Alex and The Horne Section for this unruly, ridiculous, and surprisingly satisfying show.Created, written by, and starring Alex Horne. The band includes Alex Horne (band leader), Joe Auckland (trumpet and banjo), Mark Brown (saxophone and guitar), Will Collier (bass), Ben Reynolds (drums and percussion), Ed Sheldrake (keyboards).
Read an interview with Alex Horne here.
The Horne Section TV Show is set to air weekly on Channel 4 from 10pm on Thursday 17th November, while the entire box set is available on All4 from Thursday 3rd November.
Read an interview with The Horne Section band (Joe Auckland, Mark Brown, Will Collier, Ben Reynolds and Ed Sheldrake) below
How would you describe The Horne Section TV show to those who know nothing about it, or the band?
Will: Well, it’s a mixture, it’s comedy with music I guess as a vehicle, how’s that? Musical comedy. Some of it’s very scripted and some of it was left quite loose, there are some scenes which were improvised. Some of the rehearsal scenes we didn’t know what Alex was going to throw at us at all, which I guess was in the spirit of the old Edinburgh shows that we used to do and then some of it was scripted so we had to learn all that stuff and do it as it was pretty much.
How does the series differ from some of the live shows and tours that you’ve done before?
Mark: It’s scripted!
Joe: Yeah, none of us had ever acted before and I’m still not completely sure if we have or not but we’ve tried.
Did you enjoy it more than you thought you would?
Mark: Well, I did.
Ben: I think we all really enjoyed it in the end. We had some acting lessons having done the pilot, we felt a little bit like we had imposter syndrome, so we thought we should address that and we went for acting lessons which maybe gave us some confidence to do it together.
Joe: I think we all enjoyed it in the end.
Ed: Yeah, I definitely enjoyed it.
Joe: The first week I found bloody terrifying but after that we kind of settled into it and I think it was quite fun, but obviously the process… we had no experience of, I don’t think any of us were quite prepared for how many takes it would involve. Just the fact that it was literally three minutes of footage per twelve-hour day, I think that was the average and we obviously had no idea about things like that.
What was the hardest part about performing live, ‘as live’ in a recorded series, was that something that was easy for you?
Mark: A lot of that was actually live, like the chat show element of it, they were all recorded live, similar to what we would normally do when we’re on a TV show. Then some of it we’d redo for sound reasons by miming to ourselves, stuff like that.
Ed: Our role in those bits… we were pretty much just playing as a house band which is the side of it we are used to doing. So that was alright because we were playing music and sat on stage for those bits, so yeah that was probably more comfortable than the other parts.
Ben: Yeah, I think there were definitely a few scenes nearer the end of the series that we had to do where we were away from our instruments, and I think we probably noticed that when we took away…
Mark: I was just about to say anything where we had an instrument was fine.
Ben: Yeah, and then you take that away… we all had to do a little scene with Tim Key and that was sat on the couch, and I think that, for a lot of us, really felt like a moment where you sort of come away from your instrument and lose the comfort of that.
Joe: Nothing to hide behind.
What’s the typical process that you guys go through when you’re creating a new song?
Ed: Sometimes we’ll just do it, a song totally on our own or somebody will bring an idea to one other member or sometimes we all just get together and jam something out with a concept in mind.
Mark: Alex has set the lyrics this week and I’ll write the music so I can produce it, but there’s no one way really. I think there’re quite a lot of ideas that get shoved into our WhatsApp group and then we sort of cobble together… when we have time to do stuff, we’ll cobble together a song from it.
