the 2008 Schools Spectacular

Bored of a Sunday afternoon, I found myself sitting at my desk watching the 2008 Schools Spectacular online on ABC iView.

It began well enough, with a performance that raised goosebumps of appreciation along my arms in spite of the summer heat: "Love is in the air!" the kid from the Special School sang with all his heart, somewhat off-key, but quite debonair in a white, John Paul Young style dinner jacket. "Love is in the air! Oooh oooh oooh!" echoed his more tuneful co-singer.

It was only when I saw the kids costumed with fake leg attachments run onto the stage that I recalled that I had spectated a Spectacular, live, many years back. A fake third leg could only mean one thing: Rolf Harris, introduced as "the great Australian entertainer". And I had seen him perform this very same song, Jake the Peg, at a Spectacular past, with a stageful of kids imitating his antics, at no less grand a venue than the Opera House (and with not the slightest of sly allusions to the obvious dirty joke).

The family had gone to spectacle the participation of my younger sibling in the Spectacular. Her part in the Spectacle had been to be one of several hundred kids in the Background Choir. The Background Choir, the individuals of which the audience could neither distinctly hear, nor see, had literally formed the backdrop to the singing and dancing of the Star Performers on stage, for the Background Choir had sat, shadowed in darkness for the most part, in seats sloping upwards directly behind the stage.

At the Opera House we had sat and spectated with the families of all the other kids, most of whom, like my sister, were also singing in the Background Choir. Each school must have been allocated blocks of seating to sell to the families, for we found ourselves sitting together with the families of the kids from her primary school. Isn't that? someone pointed out. I turned around to catch a glimpse of S--, eyes circled with mascara in a makeup-white face. S-- had a younger sibling too.

Before her family moved house we'd been neighbours for some years while we had both attended the same primary school. S-- had been one of the popular girls, although our school had been too small to have had impermeable boundaries between the different groups. We hadn't been friends, however. I had visited her house, next door, the once, and she had never come over to mine. Her mother was a journalist, I had somehow come to know, and S-- went to after school dance classes; the only extra-curricular classes I had attended during primary school had been the selective school entrance exam preparation classes to which I had been driven to on weekends for two months or three when I was in grade six. Disgracefully, considering, I had either daydreamed right through or jigged entirely. Early on did I develop the tendencies of the rebel who rebels by dropping out.

While walking home from the station earlier that year I had bumped into J--, a friend from the same primary school, who had gone to another high school and whom I hadn't seen in over a year. We must have been around fourteen or fifteen. J-- had said of S--: "She's become a slut. She had sex with a guy in a bedroom at a party." I have no idea why J--, who, I later heard, became a local real estate agent, had thought it necessary that I be in the know about S--. I was nonchalant in my response, suggesting that this was no big deal and that, at the cool parties, fifteen year olds could have sex, and what did it matter anyway? J-- walked away unconvinced of the soundness of my contrarian judgment while I walked away with vague feelings of envy. I had never attended parties (with boys!) at which sex could have been a possibility.

With odd memories of my school days surfacing as I watched, my viewing of the 2008 Spectacular took a turn more cynical.

The program for the 2008 Spectacle included many enthusiastically performed covers of American pop songs; musical Australiana, including Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and a truly inane song about bushrangers; and renditions of unabashedly inspirational ballads, such as Climb Every Mountain and You Raise Me Up. While a Star Performer crooned You Raise Me Up, grimacing expressively all the while, "the heros of the public education system", the teachers, were invited by the Spectacular host to walk onto the stage, which they did, meaningfully slowly. Seemingly, the Spectacular lauded the fantasy of a world in which teachers actually knew and cared for the kids under their charge and all kids were encouraged to realize their full potential.

The contrast between the roles of the Background Choir and the Star Performers in the Spectacular suggested to me that at least one of these notions was but just a fantasy; the Star Performers, the small number of kids who had received intensive training and adult attention, who had had their musical and theatrical talents nurtured, were given almost the entirety of attention, with some Star Performers leading song after song, while the Background Choir remained, well, obviously, in the background. I found this contrast interesting, for the Spectacular seemed to be an illustration of the theory that what we call talent (and the Spectacular host invoked 'talent', over and over), for the most part, is the result of nurture.

My recollections of my school days attested to a reality rather different of teachers, too. I recalled my sixth grade teacher, Mrs T; she was known to have favourites. All smiles and jokes when looking affectionately upon the most personable kids, of whom she approved, she had had a weirdly personal grudge against the kid in our class who had had epilepsy and some unelaborated upon developmental disorder. Accusing him of deliberately trying to make her life difficult she had railed against his alleged misbehaviour. He had had shaky, illegible handwriting and the habit of responding with a smart-alecky comment when provoked by meaningless questioning of the kind often used against kids by adults. But, to my recollection, at least, he had not behaved in any way that justified Mrs T's paroxysms of exasperation in the classroom. No wonder the kid, who had seemed to more or less comprehend the classwork, had looked nervous in class. The quiet kids, like quiet kids in classrooms everywhere, had been left alone to their private thoughts and imaginations.

Mrs T's opinion of herself had been that she was going mad: I have the distinct memory of Mrs T plonking away on a piano one afternoon, singing in her broken cackle a song about Santa and reindeer that she had written and composed for us to sing at an end of year show, and breaking down, mid-song, for reasons unknown, crying out "I'm going mad, I'm going mad, I tell you!" to the discordant accompaniment of the banging of random piano keys. Her cries had been addressed to herself and not to us kids who had waited out the school day, sitting cross-legged on the green carpet of the classroom floor. Most teachers, in contrast, had not been mad, but indifferent; babysitters, who had kept their personalities wrapped up to themselves, doing little more than duly copy out material from textbooks onto boards, mark completed exercises and administer the occasional test.

The Spectacular's attempts to turn multiculturalism into theatrical performance similarly induced my cynicism. In celebration of the Beijing Olympics, kids dressed as Chinamen, with long queues trailing down the backs of their red silk pyjama suits, ran around on stage. I couldn't help but wonder if there had been any real "Chinamen", boys and girls of Chinese background, dressed up as fake ones, running about under the exaggerated chinky eyes created with makeup. Talk about creating cognitive dissonance!

Other multicultural cultures were also celebrated (I seem to remember a Pharaoh themed song and dance number) but like most of mainstream Australian culture the Spectacle remains predominantly Anglo-Celtic. I am not Anglo-Celtic but I don't think that this was why the performance of Danny Boy, by a quartet of male Star Performers, and of Abide with Me, which was accompanied by dancers acting out ANZAC themed choreography, left me unmoved. The singing by a trio of brown-skinned Aboriginal (or Islander) kids, I did like; this performance stood out for its relative understatement.

In my old age I have perhaps become resentful, for to write cynically about kids with 'talent', however conceptualised, whether privileged or not, seems so. But here is no great matter-- I have suspected for some time now that I am more Waldo than Arthur. One day I too shall have a box of Private Thoughts to burn and make truly my own. And secret blogs to delete.

Found: the Doug Anderson perspective http://media.smh.com.au/?rid=44373