Gareth Malone: 'It's more Bake Off than X Factor So this time round there are auditions - he reckons he had 500 or 600 applicants - and Malone pops in and out to check on their progress. It is, he insists, "more demanding musically than anything I've done before." On the way, Malone does his apparently effortless thing, which is to play social worker and shrink to both individuals and institutions. The secret is "a good radar for people. I like going into a situation and trying to figure out what's making these people tick, and then putting music into that situation. And then in the fifth programme they compete - not for another Gareth-led tilt at the pop charts and a lucrative contract, just for a trophy to keep them on their toes and to throw the viewers a bone. "It's more akin to Bake Off than to X Factor," he offers. When I think back to my own studies, it was always through competing that you get better. Some choirs took Malone's tips on the chin. Others "played a bit more of a mindgame and got caught up with worrying about my loyalties more than they should." It is perhaps unsurprising that choirs should behave like siblings fretting about their portion of parental love. Like few other television personalities, he seems to inspire intensity, even on the streets. At times it's really gratifying. Some people say the loveliest things. But there's always a day when you think yes, delighted, thanks, but I need to go and get a bottle of Domestos. If Gareth Malone didn't exist, he would have to be invented. Part speccy Hogwartian squit, part bow‑tied professorial fogey, he somehow encompasses youthful passion and ancient wisdom, and not just in his wardrobe. Today, for the record, he is in white shirt, jeans and striking two-tone leather lace-ups. The glasses are off, and at the temple there are flecks of grey. The off-air Malone is a notably less performative version of the slightly Dickensian construct you see on television. The construct, he insists, is at least as much a creation of the cutting room. When I watch [the edited version] I'm always interested by what they choose. It's always the goofy bits, the pratting around, the throwaway comments, the one-liners, the little asides that people seem to like. He gives the larger-than-life Gareth performance mainly out of an awareness "that it might be on at eight o'clock in the evening in someone's house so it deserves a bit of effort. That sometimes means I have to summon something up. But in a choir rehearsal there is an element of performance in that anyway. That doesn't feel unnatural. It just goes with the job. He says he likes to watch his shows three times. Does he get pleasure from seeing himself at work? Does he make himself burst into tears? It's not so much that I enjoy watching myself. It's just that it's like I'm in my ideal television show. A couple of moments will get me. Where Jerry Cleary [from The Choir] says, 'It just goes to show that if you've got the bottle and the right teacher you can pretty much do anything" - that got me, that one moment." The Malone juggernaut moves on this autumn with a memoir, which will no doubt sit under the nation's Christmas tree, then he's off to shoot an American series of The Choir. Does he feel anxious that one day he may simply run out of choral gas, that the ideas will lose their freshness and there will be nowhere left to recruit rookie singers to the cause of self-improvement through four-part harmony? Well, now you've put it like that, maybe this is it. There are so many people, it's such a rich and diverse world and I'm a musician, you have to adapt and survive. One of the things that I admired about my training was that we were taught to look for opportunities and seize them and be flexible. That's what I will continue to do, whether it's Gary Barlow asking me or Sir John Eliot Gardiner. You take the opportunity and run with it, and I don't see opportunity running out. "If people really do start to think, 'Oh, enough already with this bloke with the singing projects," then there'll still be a place for singing projects. It just might not be on BBC TWO. The Choir: Sing While You Work" starts on BBC Two on 20 September