Quirky tribute to the royal wedding is an online smash
10:10am Tuesday 26th April 2011 in Your Town
ONLINE HIT A scene from the video to I Could Have Married Kate featuring Barbershopera, with, inset, the real royals
A BOLTON film director has created a quirky tribute to the Royal Wedding with a little help from awardwinning comedy singing troupe, Barbershopera.
Barry Pilling, who is a former Sharples High School and Turton Sixth Form Student, has teamed up with the singers to create the video for their song, I Could Have Married Kate.
The song sees four lovelorn would-be suitors — and one horse — express their heartbreak that Catherine Middleton is marrying Prince William and not themselves.
And the video looks set to become an internet smash, after it received more than 15,000 hits in just a few days.
Barbershopera have won a reputation for their fourpart harmonies, and have had three shows transfer to London’s West End.
But when it came to creating an online presence, the team decided against simply recording one of the songs from their shows in favour of writing a new song about the upcoming nuptials.
Mr Pilling, who grew up in Astley Bridge but who is now based in London, said: “The producer Ben Walker, who I’ve worked with in the past, said, ‘you have to meet these guys, they’re really talented’.
“We wanted to do something topical. The Olympics was too far away, but the Royal Wedding seemed just right.”
The 26-year-old added: “We didn’t just want to jump on the bandwagon, we wanted to make something people would actually want to watch.”
Once the initial idea had been finalised, the film was shot and made available online in just one week.
And now they are hoping that it will be as successful as Mr Pilling’s other videos — the director, who previously ran the Being Human blog for the BBC, has had more than one million hits on his own Youtube channel, www.youtube.com/ barrypilling.
