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 the Horne Section band 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 Alex Horne below
For those who know nothing about you and the band how would describe The Horne Section TV show?
I think it’s quite a silly, heartfelt comedy about a band made up of old friends who spend their lives trying to make each other laugh. We mainly wanted to be funny. There’s a lot of TV comedy programs that delve into deep issues, we don’t do that. It’s hopefully a funny show with music in it. I mean that’s sort of what we do with Taskmaster; we concentrate on trying to be funny and warm. Hopefully within that you get some other stuff as well, but the main idea is that every time we’re on screen we’re trying to make you laugh.
Episode One begins with a Taskmaster recording and Greg ridiculing you for not being the front man of your own show… how does it feel finally being the front man?
Well, there’s a lot in the show which is art imitating life I suppose - in the show I’m trying to get my own show, but even doing the press for it I’ve ended up being overshadowed by Greg all the time, which I really like. I hate being the front man and in the sitcom, it becomes apparent more and more that I don’t like it. It’s quite lonely being the front man and having all the weight on your shoulders. So, it’s quite true to life, I much prefer being with other people so I normally have Greg next to me, or the band - so it’s odd being nominally in charge but in reality I’m never in charge because there are always people undercutting me.
You and the band have done a range of live shows and tours, how does the series differ from what you’ve previously done?
The main difference is everything we’ve done before has been pretty much live and one take. Even when we’re doing stuff on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, you have one go at it and it’s gone, and all our podcasts and live shows are always in the moment. So suddenly we had to be actors. We recorded about six minutes of the show per day, which is really slow, so we had to adjust to suddenly taking our time over things and doing things again and again.
It took us about a week to understand the language of narrative telly but by the end we really loved it and it was quite a lot of fun, a different way of doing things. I think all musicians’ instinct is to perform it and then move on to the next bit and as a stand-up as well that’s my instinct, so that was a learning process, but we had the director, Babs Wiltshire who was really good at coaching us through that. We’re now at the point where we’re just desperate to have another go and do it all again next year, so fingers crossed.
Was it strange recording ‘as live’?
It’s quite complicated to do because there are bits of the show which are meant to be a live show, which we did have to perform in front of an audience - these were sort of the easy bits in a way, it was the acting that was the challenging part of it. It’s not the first time there’s been a show within a show, but it does make it quite complicated for the director and for us to understand, and also, we’re not used to not shooting things in order. I think we did the last scene first and so on, so that was all quite… we had to trust Babs a lot.
How did you imagine the show to look and what changed from the initial scripts?
Weirdly not a lot has changed, I mean it’s the first thing that I’ve written in terms of being a narrative thing and not a non-fiction thing. The first script I wrote was far too long, it was more like a movie, and I realised very quickly that less is more. In terms of from first script to this it’s just been pared right down but the subject matter’s the same.
The idea’s the same as in I’m insisting on making a TV show in my house and it’s a sort of exaggerated version of my life where I’ve got too many children, I’ve got a wife who is keen to see me at times and things are spiralling out of control. I haven’t changed that much; it’s meant to be a reflection of how we the band live in our lives. We’ve just tried to make it distilled, a bit more of a concentrated version of it but there are still flights of fancy and each episode has hopefully got its own character. Pleasingly it hasn’t changed that much, in a similar way to Taskmaster it hasn’t changed in eight years to where it is now - I’m taking that as a good sign that we stuck to the original vision.
Are there any ridiculous requests that didn’t quite make the cut?
Well in the first script there was a 20-piece German brass band which I thought would be fun and that was the very first thing to go - they said you can have one person! But even stuff like… there’s a tribute band to The Horne Section and their lead singer is called Alan and I wanted him to skateboard out of a meeting but that would have taken health and safety officers and training, so we had to have him leaving on foot.
There are things that have changed but every time, hopefully, any limitation is a chance to make it funnier in some way so there was nothing that I had to let go of that I was sad about. Also, the whole show is set in my house so that is useful, so it’s all in one location pretty much - that is a sensible starting point, we didn’t have to change locations every day.
Is that actually your house?
No, I wish it was my house. It’s a house of an incredible musician who appears in episode five of the show and she’s called Imogen Heap - it’s her house and she’s got a recording studio there. We went to all these location recces and just fell in love with it straight away. It’s sort of believable I could live there, I think, except I couldn’t in reality.
It looks like the sort of place where children have lived (which they have!) and you can make music there. I think some people will assume it’s my house… Hopefully we’ll shoot more stuff there, it’s such a cool place. They’ve never shot a TV series there before so it’s a new location which is great. She’s (Imogen) won Grammys - in her recording studio she’s got a couple of Grammys up which I wanted to have in the background.
What was your favourite music video to shoot?
Probably the first one, we shot one where we’re all in a car, it’s called ‘Is it the Police?’… It’s quite a magic house because every time we asked for something Imogen would go, ‘Yeah we’ve actually got a car in a barn out the back so you can shoot in there because it’s really old.’ I don’t know anything about cars but it’s a 1960s car and all six of us were crammed in, it’s the very first thing we shot in the whole sitcom, and it was a bit like the Blues Brothers which is my favourite film ever.
Like us, it’s a band going round the country being badly behaved, so it was a nice way in and we were really happy with the outcome of it; it’s stupid, we wear sunglasses and it’s funny. Also we’ve not done this sort of thing before but there’s people outside the car windows holding blue flashing lights as if the police were going past and stuff and it’s just really exciting for us to suddenly be in this TV world.
It was all very homemade, the cameraman filming through the window… most of the shoot was really fun because it’s just me and my mates mucking about but luckily, we’re led by professionals
What is the typical creative process of writing the songs? Is it a case of improvisation or…?
A little bit of that but it’s quite unpredictable because there’s six of us. Basically, someone will have an idea, whether it’s me or a musician and either I’ll say alright I’ll write some lyrics, who wants to write the music, or they’ll say we will write the lyrics and the music, and you can stay out of it. I’m not musical at all so I try to make things funnier, but they do all the hard work. We tend to split off into little groups… lockdown was quite good for us because we learnt how to be a band but apart. We would send stuff round… someone would start with the guitar section, send it to the drummer and he’d put the rhythm on it and then we’d all add backing vocals and stuff, so it’s a team effort, but sort of separately.
We’re very rarely all in the same place anymore because we’ve all got children and we all live in different places. There’s no pattern to it and inspiration strikes at the least expected time, you’ll be at a farm and see a duck behaving weirdly and think, ah there’s something in that. In the old days we used to all get together and rent a house and just see what happens, but children have stopped that and actually I think we’re better now, I think we’re more… efficient sounds the wrong word but we’re better at putting our stupid ideas into song form now.
