THE PEOPLE'S TENOR is the story of the most passionate and reckless pursuit of 'music industry success' ever told. Rejected by music colleges and TV talent shows, Scottish tenor, John Craig Innes, sings on the streets for years to make a living selling his home made CDs. Aged 47, without a record contract and fearing his time to succeed is running out, he desperately spends his life savings to hire The Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and the creative team behind Katherine Jenkins to record his debut album. When sales of his professional album come no easier, he self produces a UK concert tour to promote it! After all this, Britain’s Got Talent invite John to audition…but you’ll have to watch the film to see how that turned out! Suffice to say, John's improbable climb from street to stage will make viewers both cringe and cheer in equal measure
When we began, the film was simply about an inspiring character, particularly for our current recessionary times, who wouldn’t quit on his dreams and eventually made a living with them. It was a film about an outsider breaking into the music industry, but the film was for all outsiders in every walk of life.
After John’s audition for Britain’s Got Talent, however, the film organically became something more. It contributed to the topical debate about the merits of the ‘TV talent show’ culture today, churning out its disposable stars of questionable talent. It’s a topic about which numerous music legends have recently been critical including Elton John, Brian Ferry and Suggs to name a few.
At the start of production we didn’t know how the story would end, nor when, so conventional broadcaster funding was never an option. Inspired by the example of our subject, we made it anyway, on a shoe string budget with borrowed equipment and every favor we could beg. While this fact may leave a few rough edges, we feel this is a small price to pay for a truly uncontrived story that is allowed to happen naturally. Only a handful of so-called ‘fly on the wall’ documentaries really are.
John had always declared that he intended to use all his savings to record his debut professional album. This much we knew from the start, but nothing more, the rest of the story just evolved. So we left him at it, sometimes for months, to street perform and save money for the recording, and occasionally we picked up the camera at short notice to follow him around.
Film makers often talk about embedding themselves so the subject will soon forget the camera is present and act normally. But with concentrated filming day after day, in today’s media savvy culture, it is difficult to prevent the subject consciously or sub-consciously refining the ‘character’ they wish to appear. The filming on THE PEOPLE’S TENOR was done so infrequently over such a long period of time that John never really focused on his role as the ‘subject of a film’ - a film he probably didn’t think would ever be made anyway.
THE PEOPLES TENOR was shot in full HD on location in 3 countries between 2009-2011. A street performer is a traveler, so the film is almost a travelogue of every region of Britain with footage of John either performing or working in Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Cambridge, London, Essex, Brighton and Plymouth, and outside Britain in Prague (Czech Republic).
THE PEOPLES TENOR was produced and directed by Roger Grant and Mark Ubsdell of Cinema CLassics and Electric Theatre respectively, two long standing and experienced producers of tv, documentary and feature film. Our programs have been broadcast on channels worldwide including PBS (US), Ch. FIVE (UK), Nickelodeon, Network 9 (Aus) History Channel (Fr), TVNZ (NZ), Myserty Channel (US) among many others. Several of our programs have also become best selling DVD and video series.
