The most joyful show on TV
As The Piano makes a swift return, hosts Claudia Winkleman, Mika and Lang Lang reveal the secrets of the show’s success. No glitz, no make-up, no pathos, it’s all about the music…
W«°±ª²« ¨ª B§³¨«´ Central – a photographic studio in west London, where Claudia Winkleman and Mika are recovering from throwing shapes under strobe-esque lighting against a dazzling backdrop of blackand-white 1960s Op Art à la Bridget Riley.
There are a few serious moments but mostly it’s wise-cracking verbal ping-pong. Claudia, peering out from under what she calls her “Unapologetic Fringe”, is munching through two bags of crisps and a packet of mini-Oreos, for which she apologises quite often. Then, witnessing my fa¹ng with tape recorders while dealing poorly with a cup of tea (lack of spoon, saucer and so on) as Mika is talking, she quietly slips it away and dispatches the damp tea bag in what I suspect is a characteristically kind and unobtrusive intervention.
These are two of the three faces (I meet Lang Lang later in the week) of what is surely the most joy-filled television series of recent times: The Piano, the Channel 4 gem that went out early last year following a most unusual music competition between amateur piano players invited to perform on public pianos at major train station across the length of the country, from London’s St Pancras to Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow.
The participants – of all ages and from all backgrounds, with the most tremendous back-stories, playing every genre of music from classical to pop and rap – were under the impression that they were being lmed for some kind of documentary presented by Claudia.
Unbeknownst to them, the world’s leading classical piano player, Lang Lang, was hidden away in a small room, usually next to the public toilet, alongside the beguiling performer and pop star Mika. Both men were judging their performances with a view to selecting one pianist from each location to appear in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, where an overall winner would be announced.
Last year this was stand- out star, blind 13-year-old Lucy Illingworth from West Yorkshire, who is unable to communicate in conventional ways because of her autism and other conditions. Her transformation when she started playing the piano (Chopin’s Nocturne in B at Minor) with such tenderness and artistry was deeply aecting, moving viewers at home and in the station to tears, including the judges.
The rst series had the highest ratings for the channel since 2017, with three million viewers, and in July last year it was announced that the show had been recommissioned for both a second and third season, as well as a Christmas special and a documentary on what came next for Lucy ( The Incredibly Talented Lucy is coming soon to Channel 4).
Sitting across from me, Mika looks like the offspring of Stephen Mangan and Beatrice Dalle, while Claudia’s vibe is more Carine Roitfeld, the deliciously dishevelled and very rock ’n’ roll French fashion editor.
We talk a little about an old clip that has emerged, of Claudia looking very different in her 20s [she’s now very happy to be 52 – “I love being older”], without the famous fringe and tan, and with a dierent way of talking [she calls it her “university voice”, adding of her time at New Hall, Cambridge: “I did go to a quite fancy university”]. She looks quite Sloaney? “Very,” she agrees.
So when did she develop rock ’n’ roll Claudia? “Well, I don’t feel rock ’ n’ roll at all. I’m denitely not.”
It started with the fringe when she went to a hairdresser and said, at 28: “‘I think I’d like a fringe’ and he gave me – you’re both going to feel nauseous when I say this word – a wispy fringe and I said, ‘I think I need an unapologetic fringe.’ And once I had that, everything else followed.”
The black eyeliner? “I think I had that already but not in that clip because I was doing telly and I had no idea what I was doing and they said, ‘Let’s make you up like this’ and I was like, ‘OK,’ but I was always a bit Emo.”
Maybe a bit Goth, too? “Oh I was very Goth– even now, a pointy boot and a long duster coat...” she swoons.
W¦§¨ ©ª«¬ ¬¦« make of Nick Cave and his wife Susie Bick, who used to rock that Goth look. “Love. I met Susie once and I mounted her. I don’t think I’m allowed to meet her again. I also love Ozzy Osbourne and in the end, I just want to eat a bat.”
One of the reasons we love Claudia – apart from her sense of mischief, warmth and genuine curiosity – is that she is an original. I mean, honestly, who says the things she says routinely – particularly now – and gets away with it?
The journalist Stuart Heritage captured her presenting style brilliantly, writing that she is “the concept of free jazz made corporeal” and “has made a career of appearing to say whatever happens to be ambiently ¯oating through her head at any given moment”. I remind her that she actually said, “My ovaries just clacked” on The Piano when she spotted a baby. Mika is aghast: “Did she really say that? She does get very, very excited around babies. Honest l y, she’s the ▷
babysitter at the station.”
“I don’t remember that,” Claudia says. “We never watch it.”
Is she desperate to be a granny? Is she already encouraging her children (Jake, 21, Matilda, 17, and Arthur, 12) to become young parents? “Yes I am, and if they were here now they would be, like, ‘Please just tell her to relax!’”
She travels with her youngest on the Tube to school every day and this is when she listens to music – “and once I’ve kissed him and tried to lick his eyebrows in front of his friends – which by the way is not what one should do but it’s my job to be embarrassing – then I put my headphones on and listen to music very loud. I want Missy Elliott, I want Dr Dre and rap and – BOOM! – it wakes me up.
“At home, I’ll usually have Radio 4 or Radio 2 on if I’m cooking or just pottering around, but I don’t normally listen to music then because I’m usually pestering the kids. Am I being boring?”
This is typical of her. Claudia is self-deprecating to a fault. I was berating her about it when we met for an interview 14 years ago, but she’s even worse now.
S integral part of The Piano’s appeal (as she is in Strictly and that other successful series The Traitors, for which she won a Bafta last year), but she demurs. Isn’t it about time, dear Claudia, to own your success? “I’m super-happy and super-grateful, but I’m just the conduit who says, ‘Hello.’ The Piano is about these extraordinary people who come to play, it’s about the instrument and it’s about Mika and Lang Lang – [she turns and says to Mika] Don’t respond!”
“She knows me!” he laughs. “I love this conversation – I’m serious, I really mean it.” He clearly agrees about her tendency to put herself down.
“I feel quite secure in the stuff that I know I can do,” she responds. “Reading out loud on Strictly. Greeting a lovely person who’s come in and might be a bit nervous to play the piano. Walking around a round table. What I really can’t bear is ‘ Yeah, I’ve got this’. I’m allergic to any form of arrogance.
“I love a healthy bit of imposter syndrome and I am a big believer in being bad at things. When my kids were like, ‘Mum, shall I learn a musical instrument?’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t. Not unless you really want to.’ I want them to be bored and I just want to say aloud, ‘It’s OK not to be good at stuff.’ You know, I’m not good at parallel parking – ¥ne.”
We move on and touch on the wars raging around the world. Claudia’s response is to donate and keep informed: “Read about it from every angle so at least you feel informed, not ‘I just can’t look at it’.” Her personal solace to sorrow is to wrap herself around the people she loves, which is her family.
For Mika, it is music. “There has always been this association with processing the inexpressible through something that allows you to deal with it in a di¨erent way. There was this ¥ne line with my family between tears and joy, and music was always this form of poetic resistance, which can have huge and strong consequences.”
The bare bones of biography can mislead. Read that 40-year-old Mika was born in Beirut, moved to Paris, then Pimlico adjacent to London’s Chelsea, went to the famous Westminster School in London, with an American father in banking, and it paints a picture of gilded ease.
The reality was rather di¨erent.
In 1990, during the war in Kuwait, Mika’s father, Michael Holbrook Penniman, was trapped in the US embassy for seven months. He returned to his family a shell of a man: heavily bearded, gaunt and troubled.
Mika didn’t call him Dad again, I read? “I called him ‘Mike’ because I didn’t recognise him. It was hard to understand that he had trauma but then when everything fell apart and he lost his job...
“There were five of us children and we lost everything, then we started again. We knew every phrase to say to be within the law to make sure the bailiffs didn’t come into the house. At a certain point, it became too much and we kind of ran away from France and started again. We didn’t run away, sorry – we left. And then we lived in a bed and breakfast near Pimlico for two years.”
H is parents managed to stabilise things, but it was still bumpy. Mika was suspended four times at Westminster, for quite long intervals, because his school fees couldn’t be paid. This led to almighty rows between his parents and he would tell his mother – American-born Lebanese-Syrian Joannie – that he would be happy at any school.
However, when the family first moved to London the nine-year-old Mika had attended the Lycée, where he was so badly bullied that he was home-schooled for a while by his mum, to whom he was particularly close and who sadly died three years ago.
“She was very eccentric,” he says, affectionately. “Home was music, colour and tears all mixed together. My father was an amazing partner to her... you can’t really speak about one without speaking about the other. There was turbulence but he was the perfect partner to her hurricane of colour.”
M¯ °±²³´ and as a child had reading and writing issues – but he speaks five languages and broadcasts regularly in at least three of them. He also has a wonderfully evocative turn of phrase. I am particularly taken by “the crutch of snobbery”.
But back then, life was more of a challenge. “I stopped communicating with the world around me. I was hardly speaking. I forgot how to read and write. My path out of it was music – it allowed me to start rebuilding and gave me another sense of value. I may have been failing
‘I’m a big believer in being bad at things... I can’t parallel park’
CLAUDIA WINKLEMAN
‘Mum was eccentric; home was music, colour and tears’
MIKA
◁ at the spelling exam and having a hard time, but I’m not worthless – ‘Look, I can do this!’”
To which Claudia is keen to point out: “Mika hid in the music room from the bullies.”
Music comforts him still. He suggests you give the same attention to it as you would reading a book or watching a film – one song and you absorb yourself in it totally. It could be Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You or Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique: “All those colours, all those textures – you can’t listen to that in the background while you’re making your tomato sauce!”
“Mika and I get on so brilliantly but you’re about to go off me!” Claudia announces. Addressing him she adds: “So this is how I listen to music... I don’t like anything new. I stopped listening to bands in probably 1995 and those are still my favourites. That period of Brit Pop with Oasis, Blur, Pulp. We would run around university singing Wonderwall at the top of our lungs and that is the music I revert to.”
T between Claudia and Mika is evident for all to see – but what of his relationship with his fellow judge, the renowned pianist Lang Lang? Initially he had seemed very reserved in contrast to Mika’s exuberant chattiness, his sherbet-coloured shirts and bold necklaces. But over the weeks it was clear that an endearing friendship had developed, almost a bromance.
“There are moments when Lang Lang is quite tactile and you wouldn’t expect that,” Mika says. “When he’s ¡nding something really funny he can’t control himself. He’ll laugh and he starts stroking my face and I’m, like, ‘Oh my God!’ There’s very few situations in my life where I’m having a nice time, especially with a man, and he just strokes your face out of a£ection.”
All three of them are clearly, and quite rightly, proud of the show: “We’re a beautiful little poetic success – there’s no big shiny floor, there’s no mechanic of pathos,” Mika says. “They haven’t had make-up or been zhuzhed,” Claudia adds. “There isn’t a floor manager saying, ‘Come in and please introduce yourself.’”
But now everyone knows how the The Piano works, did that change the dynamic for season two? “I was so worried that they’d come in a ballgown waving – ‘Lang Lang! Mika! I’m here!’” Claudia vamps. “But actually because you can’t see them, they’re sort of forgotten.’”
So the authenticity remains... “It’s beyond that,” Claudia says. “I’m holding their bags!” “And they’re sitting at the Costa co£ee shop or Greggs!” Mika adds. “But once they play,” Claudia chimes in, “it’s not humdrum.” Mika smiles: “Exactly. It’s magic.”