Imagine flitting overseas for a romantic break with your partner, only to pull back your hotel room curtain and find a live, multi-thousand-faced studio audience applauding and screaming your name. It may sound like an episode of Black Mirror, but Dr. Ciara Mackey, a regular Belfast girl, found herself in that position in 2017, all thanks to her boyfriend of two years, Steven.
Steven sneakily arranged Ciara’s slot on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, with one segment – Unexpected Stars – surprising a musical member of the public with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform on a West End stage. When Ciara shook off the nerves and shock at where she was (and the star comedian interviewing her!), she performed a simply beautiful song like a pro, amassing over 1.6 million YouTube views to date.
As the clip begins, Michael McIntyre addressed his Big Show audience, revealing the deceiving set-up behind Ciara’s first West End gig. After the audience had filed into Drury Lane’s Theatre Royal, producers quickly redecorated the venue into a four-star hotel, complete with actors under the guise of hotel guests, staff, and builders to bring the false scene to life. Michael’s backstage tour of the revamped venue is humour-packed and oddly wholesome for the absolute dystopia it turns out to be.
The walk-around culminates in a “great view” from the smaller-than-anticipated hotel room: the 2000-capacity theater, blocked out with a TV audience including Ciara’s mum and friends. Her mum paints a picture of Ciara: a girl who works 12-hour night shifts on the A&E ward and has been singing “anything” from pop to opera since she was 3 years old.
With a GPS tracker on Ciara and Steven’s car, CCTV cameras track the couple through multiple skits with actors who repeat Michael McIntyre’s absurd conversation starters, spoken through a concealed earpiece. The couple play along unsuspectingly, until the moment they drop their bags in the hotel room and part the stage curtains at their “window”.
Ciara, absolutely gobsmacked, freezes in the shock of the moment. Up until this point, she’d only sung in pubs (mostly to pay her way through medical school), and any Music Man reader with a hint of stage talent will feel her pressure to perform impromptu, unrehearsed, paralysed by the eyes of an unexpected audience.
But after a quick costume change and stage design shake-up, Ciara unleashes her voice like a real West End singer; an undiscovered performing arts pro, calm, graceful, and confident against her cosmic backdrop.
It was enough to almost move Steven to tears, while countless stunned viewers have taken to the comments to sing their praise; one noting, “Considering she was unaware of the whole setup her personality and manners were great and she is the sort of person that you would treasure as a friend.”