A key plot point of The Choral revolves around Roger Allam singing badly. This is the man who originated the role of Javert in Les Misérables back in 1985, who was Olivier-nominated for his performance in Cy Coleman’s musical City of Angels and who once contemplated a career as an opera singer.
Talk me through that, I say: the bad singing. We’re at his home in southwest London. He’s very busy, filming, but a small window of time was found to meet – did I mind coming to his house? No, of course I didn’t, and here I am on a blustery Monday morning, perched on a chair next to him, sat in the corner on the sofa in a comfortable but anonymous front room looking on to a leafy street.
“Well, I’m slightly relieved,” he says with a laugh. “The part in Gerontius” – that his character attempts to sing – “is the tenor solo, which is endless and terribly difficult and very high. And I – as you hear – have a baritone voice, quite a low one as well. And I haven’t sung for about 15 years. And so I was rather glad that it had to be bad!”
The Alan Bennett-scripted film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is set in 1916 in a Yorkshire factory town on the cusp of huge societal change, hollowed out by grief as its young men die in foreign fields. The choral society is at the heart of this community, but even there it’s far from business as usual: Bach’s St Matthew Passion is verboten (German music). There’s a new chorus master. And so urgent is the need for new singers, they might have to look beyond the ranks of the respectable middle-classes. Allam plays the gentle local mill owner, who funds “the choral”, and so finds a way to assuage his own grief.
It’s full of glorious period detail, wit and subtle wisdom, and Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius plays a starring role. Allam’s only prior experience of the piece had not been positive. “Not long before we started filming there was a performance in London I went along to and I’m afraid to say I found it rather boring,” he admits. “But singing it was tremendously exciting.”
For the most part, it’s the actors themselves whose voices we hear. “The chorus passages I found terribly moving: the effort of singing all together and trying to make it good. My father was a vicar, so I was in his choir, and one at school, and I toyed with the idea of doing classical singing at university. Music and singing have always been a part of my life.”
One of the splashiest turns in the film is Simon Russell Beale’s cameo as an inordinately pompous Elgar who, on realising this amateur choral society has rearranged and reimagined his work, retracts his permission for the performance. Does Allam know if there is any truth in Bennett’s script? Can the composer really have been, quite frankly, such a git?
“I don’t know!” he says. “I think maybe Elgar was a bit pissed off that he wasn’t as revered as he thought perhaps he should be. The first performance of Gerontius had gone really, really badly. I guess it’s understandable if he pushed back at that. But as to his ‘gitacity’ – I’m not qualified to say.”
We move to a character whose gitacity is unambiguous: Javert, the villain of Les Misérables, now back in the public eye as the musical celebrates its 40th birthday. Allam was asked to be involved in the celebrations, he says, but wasn’t free. Did he, then a young RSC actor in his early 30s, have a sense of the phenomenon that the show was going to be?
“No! The reviews were very mixed although there were some people who really loved it from the get-go. When we opened at the Barbican, it felt too long. Transferring into the West End, some bits were taken out. And straight away it was full all the time.” To what does he attribute its huge success? “It is a kind of feelgood musical in the sense it made people feel like they were good people; morally good for being in sympathy with the characters. It works the same way big spectacular melodrama works: it stirs you.”
Likewise Game of Thrones, in which Allam sported a magnificent beard with Viking-style plaits. “I’m hardly in it!” he protests. “I’d just been doing Falstaff at the Globe” – for which he won an Olivier award – “so I was completely broke. It was only a couple of episodes. But it inflated the bank balance enough to get through the year.”
He hadn’t seen a second of the show until the pandemic, when he and his younger son resolved to sit through the whole thing. “And some of it’s absolutely brilliant! There’s one battle scene which is just marvellous, makes you realise what a terrifying species we can be. And some of it’s just shit!”
Allam is, as you might expect, wonderfully unfiltered. A little like one of his best-known creations, The Thick of It’s Peter Mannion: a suave but beleaguered Tory MP, and the stuff of a thousand memes. “They were such glorious scripts,” he smiles of the show, whose 20th anniversary falls this year. “It was the beginning of that time – which is still going on – when politics seems to have become just about making announcements. As long as you can make announcements and get a bit of attention …”
What does he think Mannion would be doing now? “Oooh, some shady business somewhere. Feathering his own nest as much as possible. But I don’t think he’d be joining Reform.”
That’s the show he’s recognised by young people for – though for those younger still, it’s the charming CBeebies animation Sarah and Duck, for which he provides friendly voiceover. “On the train into town I sometimes get parents coming up to me saying thank you, because it was the only thing that would get their child to sleep, or asking me if I’d mind saying ‘Happy Birthday, Chloe’ in my Sarah and Duck voice.”
Does he mind? “No, of course not! It’s sweet. It’s not like I’m being pursued down the street by rabid mothers with pushchairs.”
Another voice role that sees him held in huge affection is Radio 4’s Cabin Pressure, written by the comic genius John Finnemore. “That was a joy to do,” he says. Does he have a favourite episode? He reflects. “I do love otters.” He means Ottery St Mary, in which, among other things, his character, Douglas, explains the origins of the name of the Devon town, and he, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Martin and Finnemore’s Arthur consider how many hypothetical otters could be fitted into a small plane.
Many of the roles Allam has played lean into his appeal as a languid middle-class sex symbol, quick of wit but large of heart. It’s that come-to-bed voice, perhaps, which is the clincher: deep, rich and smooth. In 2010’s Tamara Drewe he was an oleaginous crime novelist who romanced Gemma Arterton – and ended up trampled to death by cows, and in French farce Boeing-Boeing he juggled three separate fiancées. Radio 4’s ongoing Conversations from a Long Marriage sees him as Joanna Lumley’s exasperated but loving husband as the two discuss friends’ divorces, descaling kettles and whether it’s reasonable to expect dancing and sex on the same night.
Yet despite this distinctive persona, Allam is not at ease as simply himself, he says. “I’d feel uncomfortable going on television and just being me. I wouldn’t like that at all.” Bookers for Celebrity Traitors or Bake Off should try elsewhere; even panel shows are not his bag, he says, despite his manifest gift for comedy and brilliant delivery of one-liners. “No, I’d hate that. I’d be no good.”
It’s telling, too, that he feels most kinship not with those roles one might assume most closely mirror the real-life man, but with DI Fred Thursday in the Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour. “Having played a lot of sneery middle-class bastards, I was immediately attracted to the character because this was more from my actual family background – working class. One grandfather was a labourer on a building site, the other was a stonemason,” he says.
“Thursday is absolutely someone of my parents’ generation. My mother was born in 1912, my father in 1914, his brother Fred was born in 1916. Playing him was an opportunity to explore and remember the 1960s and the lives of people like my own family.”
The Choral, too, taps into this interest in the past lives of everyday people who coalesce to make beauty amid hardship. “Singing in a choir is a way of bringing communities together. Art and music, drama – these are the things we do best. And we don’t kill each other in our millions over it.”
He pauses. “It made me think maybe I should join a choir or have some lessons and see where my voice is … if it still exists in some form.”
• The Choral is in UK cinemas from 7 November, US cinemas from 25 December and Australian cinemas from 1 January 2026.
