Actress Victoria Hamilton

Choral story

Victoria Wood is telling the story of a 1920s children's choir in a stage show that will premiere at this year's Manchester International Festival.

In 1925, some 250 working class children from more than 50 schools across Manchester were recruited for a choir that would go down in musical history.

They rehearsed twice a week, and by 1929 were deemed good enough to make a recording with the prestigious Halle Orchestra by its principal conductor Sir Hamilton Harty.

Together, they recorded Henry Purcell's Nymphs and Shepherds at the Free Trade Hall. The angelic performance made the resulting 78rpm record a surprise hit.

Forty-five years later, Thames Television reunited some of the choristers for a documentary about that day.

A 21-year-old Victoria Wood happened to be watching. And the tale of those children, and what became of them, has stayed with the comedian ever since.

"I've always thought it would make a good story, of the children making that record," Wood says.

"It's a famous record and it was very unusual for schoolchildren to be making a record in 1929, especially with the Halle Orchestra."

'Wonderful quality'

The crackly recording has an ethereal quality that has helped it speak across the decades, Wood explains.

"There's just something about the sound of it - I don't know whether it's because it was recorded on one microphone, and so it doesn't sound like a modern record, or whether it's because they sing really fast.

"I don't know what it is. There's some wonderful quality about it that I find very touching."

When the Manchester International Festival asked Wood, from Bury, for ideas for any Manchester-related shows, she immediately thought about recreating that recording.

"My starting point was to reconstruct that event," she says. "But then I thought actually just to reconstruct that event, that's not a play, that's just a kids' concert.

"And so I started to weave in this story of what those kids might be like 40 years down the line."

The result is That Day We Sang, which she describes as "a play with music".

"This isn't a musical," she insists. "This is a play with songs - slightly different.

Costume Drama Thursday: Victoria & Albert and The Young Victoria ...

. Even though I was far more interested in the works and time period of Jane Austen when V&A aired in 2001, it aired during the semester I was taking the second half of my British Literature course, so I watched it due to my general interest in the era (and a love for history, romance, and costume dramas).

Before watching V&A, I was most familiar with the lead actress, Victoria Hamilton from her role as Henrietta Musgrove in the 1995 (best, definitive) version of Persuasion (it was only after seeing P that I recognized Victoria Hamilton in her bit role as Mrs. Forster in P&P). Because I only knew her as Henrietta, a silly young girl, I was concerned at her ability to pull off the range of emotion and maturity surely needed for Queen Victoria. And about the fact that she has a somewhat high, girlish, squeaky voice. And it took me a long time to figure out that Jonathan Firth, who’d played Lord Arthur Goring in An Ideal Husband , was Colin’s (much) younger brother.