We still
need to …

I am starting One Voice because something is missing.

As reasons for starting a business go, this is not especially impressive.

People would prefer market research. A target audience. A sentence with “scalable” in it.

What I have is loneliness.

Not the grand sort, with rain against a window and someone gazing meaningfully into a cup.

The ordinary sort.

The kind where you know people. Receive messages. Have appointments. Work. Function. And still find yourself standing in the kitchen on a Tuesday evening, thinking: I could belong somewhere tonight. I just don’t know where.

I want to sing. Not beautifully. That would be an unnecessary barrier to entry. I want to stand in a room with other people, draw breath and have a go at the same note. That is all. So I do what people do now when they don’t know something. I reach for my phone. I search. Choir near me. Singing tonight. Singalong Cologne. Open choir. Choir no audition. Choir for people who haven’t been sure whether they’re an alto or a soprano since about 1987.

The internet responds with tremendous confidence and remarkably little help. I find websites from 2014. A choir whose last rehearsal took place during the pandemic. PDFs. Facebook pages. Events calendars. Phone numbers. Concert listings for the day before yesterday.

Somewhere out there, people are singing. A great many of them. I just can’t see where. This bothers me. My phone knows where I am. It knows which restaurant is open 230 metres away. It can find me an e-scooter, a dentist, three charging points and someone who will deliver fried noodles in twelve minutes.

But ask it, “Where can I sing with other people right now?” and it suddenly turns philosophical. That is where One Voice begins.

With a question. Why can I pinpoint my own location but not see where the people around me are singing together?

I picture a map. One dot is me. Other dots appear around it. A choir rehearses on Thursdays. There is a singalong over there. Here, they need more men’s voices. Anyone can come to this one. There is a concert there at the weekend.

I don’t need to know these people. I just need to know they’re there. The difference is larger than you might think.

Loneliness doesn’t always mean there is nobody there. Sometimes you’re simply missing the coordinates.

I write down the first sentence.

Then the second.

Before long, there are words on my piece of paper:

Location. Choir. Event. Profile. Search. Radius.

It already looks reassuringly like work. I like that. I still need to find out whether this already exists. We still need to talk to choirs. We still need to establish who “we” are. We still need to build an app. We still need to do more or less everything.

But I can already see that little dot on the screen. My location. And people all around it.

On this first day, I don’t yet know what One Voice will look like. I only know what I want it to do. Turn “People are singing somewhere” into “There. Go.”

That is really all.

I am sitting at my computer. One Voice. My map.

Almost empty, for now.

I put dots on it.

Here.

Here.

Here.

I call this starting a business. I call it building a network. I talk about visibility, choirs, encounters, making it easier for people to find one another. All of it true. None of it the whole truth. Because as I build an app that is meant to tell someone, “You are here. And there are the others,” something inside me starts counting.

Again.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

It is remarkable how often the way out of loneliness begins with something you find yourself caring about.

Loneliness is usually described as an absence. Someone is missing. A hand, a voice, a person at the other end of the table who notices you are quieter than usual today.

That is the obvious kind.

There is another.

It comes not from having nobody around, but from nothing reaching for you any more. You can be lonely among people: busy, successful, loved. You can answer messages, buy groceries, work, pay bills, and slowly disappear into a state in which the world is still going on but no longer asks anything of you.

For our inner lives, that is a crucial distinction. We need more than connection. We need something to matter. There has to be a difference between doing something and not doing it.

Whether I come.

Whether I call.

Whether I water the plant.

Whether I disagree.

Whether I stay.

Whether I care.

The moment I begin to care about something, a connection forms between me and the world. It can be a remarkably small connection.

A plant will do.

A choir.

A dog standing beside the bed at seven in the morning, wholly indifferent to my existential condition because it needs a wee.

This may be one of responsibility’s less celebrated qualities: it is an antidote to being entirely absorbed in yourself. Not always a pleasant one. But effective. Caring for something calls you out of your own head.

There is an old philosophical thought here, too. Martin Buber distinguishes between I–It and I–Thou. In I–It, I encounter the world as an object: useful, irritating, interesting, dull. In I–Thou, something else happens. I enter into a relationship.

What matters is not even whether the other is a person. It is the movement itself. I cease to be the centre of my own attention. Suddenly there is something else. And it counts.

Loneliness often moves in the opposite direction. It narrows your field of vision. Not out of selfishness, but out of pain. People with toothache tend not to develop a passionate interest in world affairs either.

The body reliably draws your attention to the place that hurts. Emotional pain can do the same. You start watching yourself.

Why does nobody write?

Why do I miss this person?

Why am I never the one they mean?

Why do I feel like this?

When does it stop?

The self becomes a windowless room in which you keep rearranging the furniture. You can have very clever thoughts in there. It is still the same room. Something you care about breaks a window into it. Because care has a direction. It leads away from me. Even the word holds more than we tend to hear in it: the cares that weigh on us, and the care we give. Worry, yes, but also attention. Responsibility. Making room for something in your awareness and saying: what happens to you concerns me. That is where connection begins. It need not wait for love. Love is simply its most spectacular form.

This is why we ask too much of romantic relationships as a cure for loneliness.

Of course another person can reach us. But asking one person to keep rescuing us from loneliness gives them a job larger than any relationship can hold. They are no longer simply there to be loved. They are meant to replace the world. Very few people can bear that.

I am more interested in the movement the other way: from asking, “Who is interested in me?” to discovering, one day, “I am interested in something.”

It sounds almost absurdly small. It isn’t. Interest is already a relationship. The word comes from the Latin interesse: to be between, to be involved. When something interests you, you are no longer entirely sealed off. There is something between you and the world. A thin thread at first. You want to know what happens next.

To this person.

To this tree.

To this project.

To this political situation.

To this sentence.

To a choir that needs another tenor and appears willing to stake the future of Western civilisation on finding one. Suddenly there is a tomorrow. That is the crucial thing.

Loneliness changes time as well as space. It can make the present endless. A lonely evening is occasionally capable of lasting about three and a half weeks. Something that matters, on the other hand, creates a future. I need to check again tomorrow. I want to see whether it works.

Someone is waiting for my reply. The plant needs water. The piece isn’t finished. We have rehearsal on Thursday.

These are not great philosophical revelations. They are small commitments to the future. And that is precisely how they can hold a person steady. Meaning is not a pleasant feeling you have to locate somewhere inside yourself. It lies in turning towards something beyond yourself:

A task. A person. Something that needs doing, or answering.

This does not mean that getting involved simply makes loneliness disappear. You can hide in tasks, too. You can be there for everyone else so that you never have to meet yourself. You can help, organise, rescue and look after people until care becomes a highly respectable way of avoiding your own life.

That happens too.

The difference is whether what I am doing numbs me or connects me. Numbness makes me feel less. Connection makes me feel more. Unfortunately, that is the price.

Once I care about something, it can hurt me. Love can bring loss. Commitment can bring disappointment. Plant a tree and you may watch it wither. Trust people and you may discover that some of them are extraordinarily gifted idiots.

Indifference has its attractions. It is a form of protection. Something I don’t care about can hardly disappoint me. The trouble is that reducing pain this way also reduces life. Feeling alive and being vulnerable use the same door. You cannot let in only one of them.

Which makes “I care about this” a much larger sentence than it sounds.

It means:

I allow something outside myself to have an effect on me.

I accept that I am not self-contained.

I can be touched.

And so the opposite of loneliness does not necessarily begin with company. It begins with concern.

Someone can sit alone at a table and feel profoundly connected because a person, a thing, the world itself matters to them. Someone else can stand among a hundred people and remain utterly lonely because nothing reaches them any more.

The surprising thing about loneliness is that we do not leave it only when someone comes towards us. We also leave it by moving towards something ourselves.

A person.

A task.

A plant.

An idea.

Something whose wellbeing suddenly claims a small place in our own lives.

And there it is, that unassuming little word:

Matters.

Something matters. Not everything. That would be too much.

Something is enough.

Because once something matters to you, you are no longer standing quite alone in the world.

You are already in a relationship with it.

At some point, people ask themselves:

Who am I when I no longer do my job?

The firefighter, when there are no more fires to put out. The woman at the post office, when she no longer sells stamps. The actress, when she isn’t acting. The fisherman, when he stops catching fish. Me, presumably, when I stop producing things.

We tell the story of ourselves through what we do.

I am a producer.

I am an actress.

I am a doctor.

I am a mother.

I lead a choir.

I am this.

I do that.

A doing word is remarkably good at holding a self together.

It gets harder when the doing stops.

What remains is:

I am.

A grammatically complete sentence that remarkably few people know what to do with. I am working as a producer on Wetten, dass..?, the German television show. Jennifer Aniston is a guest.

She arrives with her manager, is shown to her dressing room and gets ready for the show. At some point I go in to see her.

She is sitting at the dressing-table mirror, looking at her face.

I say, “Hello.”

She says, “Hello.”

Then neither of us says anything for about five minutes. Jennifer Aniston looks in the mirror. She doesn’t move.

It takes me a few seconds to notice.

She doesn’t tilt her head. Doesn’t run a hand through her hair. Doesn’t smooth the skin, check her profile or lift her chin. None of the small human repertoire we perform in front of mirrors when we think nobody is watching. Her face is perfectly still.

I wait for something.

A movement at the corner of her mouth. A frown. That barely visible narrowing of the eyes when we discover something about ourselves we dislike. Or like. Any sign that something is passing between this woman and her reflection.

Nothing.

It is a strange sight. A face I know, although I don’t know the woman. I probably know this face better than the faces of some people I have had dinner with. I have seen it laugh, cry, doubt, love, lose patience. I know what Jennifer Aniston looks like when someone leaves her.

Or I think I do.

Now she is face to face with herself, and I can read nothing.

Not even whether she likes what she sees.

She looks for a long time.

Long enough for me to start searching her face for the thought behind it.

I can’t find one.

And eventually I realise that this is what unsettles me.

To this day, I don’t know what she sees there. All I know is that I am sitting beside someone whose face is familiar to millions, while she herself is simply looking at it.

No famous actress doing particularly famous things. A person sitting in front of a mirror, looking. That is all.

This is harder to sit with than you might imagine. Especially for a producer. Producers are paid to make things happen. Five minutes in which nothing happens would normally qualify as a technical fault.

Shortly before the show, Thomas Gottschalk comes to see her.

At the time, he has a customary introduction for international guests.

It goes something like this:

“Hello. You don’t know me. My name is Thomas Gottschalk, and I’m the host of this show. I hope you have a wonderful evening. And if I may ask one thing: should we ever meet again, somewhere, I would be delighted if you remembered me. My name is Thomas Gottschalk.”

Looking back, I am very fond of that moment. Two of the best-known people in their respective television worlds, sitting in a dressing room, and suddenly it comes down to something very simple.

Do you recognise me?

Do you know who I am?

Will I still exist for you when this evening is over?

I am still sitting with Jennifer Aniston. She is still looking in the mirror. Eventually I can no longer bear the silence. I get up and ask whether she needs anything. Whether I can do anything for her. Whether there is anything about the show we still need to discuss. She looks at me in the mirror.

“Thank you.”

I say, “Thank you,” too.

And leave.

I think about those minutes for a long time. A host asking to be remembered. An actress silently studying her own face. And me, apparently compelled to do something the instant another person simply exists.

We ask “Who am I?” far more often than we realise.

We just give the question better disguises.

A profession.

Success.

Fame.

A role.

A request to be recognised.

We are remarkably ill-prepared simply to be.

We start asking children very early what they want to become. As though they were nothing yet. Later, we ask, “What do you do?” and mean, “Who are you?”

A useful shortcut. Until it becomes a dangerous one. Because things disappear.

Jobs.

Responsibilities.

Roles.

Health.

Success.

People we have cared for.

Suddenly someone can no longer work.

No longer look after another person.

No longer perform.

No longer organise.

No longer remember yesterday.

And what seemed a philosophical question becomes a very practical one:

Who am I now? This is one of the great demands of being human:

Our worth must remain when our usefulness falls away.

A person is more than what they get done for other people.

More than their productivity.

More than their role.

More than their use.

It sounds obvious.

Our daily lives often suggest otherwise.

We admire people for what they can do.

We pay them for what they deliver.

We invite them because they are interesting.

We need them because they do something.

And then there is that dangerous little gap. What about someone who, just now, cannot do anything? What about someone who is simply there? That is why I remember the dressing room.

Not because of Jennifer Aniston. Still less because of Thomas Gottschalk. Because of how much was gathered into those few minutes.

One says: please remember me. Another looks in the mirror. And I sit beside her, already hunting for a task.

Three ways of approaching the same question.

Am I here?

Do I count?

Will I remain?

This is why singing together moves me so much. Of course we are doing something in a choir. We are singing. But for a moment, the usual hierarchy of our occupations falls away. Nobody cares whether the man beside them ran a corporation yesterday or sold stamps. Nobody cares what title the woman in the second row holds. Bodies stand beside other bodies. They breathe. They open their mouths. They try for the same note.

And the most important question is no longer:

What do you do?

It is:

Are you here?

I think we underestimate how radical that question is. “Are you here?” asks nothing about achievement. Nothing about status. Nothing about usefulness. Only presence.

Being here.

Being a person.

And still, that isn’t quite enough for me. Because simply being here is one thing. Feeling that your being here makes a difference to someone else is another.

I will come back to that. There is also my encounter with Nicole Kidman to tell you about.

I think in pictures and music.

So I start with a song.

This is not a particularly structured approach. People starting businesses presumably begin with things in boxes. Target audiences. Processes. Responsibilities. Possibly even spreadsheets.

I look for a song and picture a logo to go with it.

Both help me find my way into the thing I am trying to build.

My song is “Your Song”.

I am on a flight to Cannes for a television trade fair, listening to every version the internet has to offer. Elton John’s original remains unbeaten.

After that, I am particularly fond of Al Jarreau and Marla Glen.

I hear the same words in different voices and eventually begin to wonder whether the song belongs here at all.

“Your Song”.

Isn’t it too personal?

Too private?

Too much one person offering something to another? The very opposite of what One Voice is meant to become? Should One Voice be called “Your Song”? Or should it absolutely not? I turn this over for a while, until I realise that thinking is getting me nowhere.

So I stop. And listen to what I feel. The feeling of “Your Song” is beautiful.

But intense.

It is longing.

That concentrated ache when one person becomes more important to another than is altogether sensible.

It isn’t the feeling I am looking for with One Voice.

One Voice is not meant to be the great longing for one particular person.

I want the other feeling.

When people are honestly glad to see one another.

When they open up.

When nobody needs to be more important than anyone else.

When separate voices briefly become something shared, without anyone disappearing into it.

The plane glides through the clouds. I often use these moments to be with myself. To find my way back to myself. Up here. Unattached to the ground.

For a while there is no road, no desk, no task physically keeping you in one place.

Only this peculiar state between two places.

There are few easier ways to feel how intensely you are aware of being alive than to have several kilometres of air beneath you.

If I were rich, I would offer meditation retreats on long-haul flights. Business class, obviously. Madness ought to have a viable business model. But I am not rich.

And the idea starts arguing with me before I have finished thinking it.

Because what I am looking for with One Voice moves in the opposite direction. No exclusive altitude. No people sitting above other people. I believe in atmosphere. In time spent together.

In those rare moments when status becomes surprisingly irrelevant because people actually meet. We are not all the same. But for a moment we can meet as equals. That is community. Not flying higher and farther. Coming back down to earth.

I ask my friend, asleep beside me while I fly through all these worlds of my own.

“One Voice or Your Song?”

She answers at once. “One Voice, obviously. Your Song is yours. One Voice is everyone.”

Oh. Yes. Of course. As simple as that.

I could have asked her before take-off.

But then I would have missed the journey through twenty versions of a song. And I enjoyed that.

Apparently you don’t have to avoid every detour just because someone else has a straight answer waiting at the end.

The plane touches down. I feel refreshed. And I have made up my mind.

One Voice.

On we go.

I am sitting on a kitchen floor in Cannes.

It sounds better than it is.

The kitchen is roughly one square metre. The entire apartment, twenty. My friend is still asleep, and because I don’t want to wake her, I am trying to arrange my body on the tiles behind the kitchen door so that as much of me as possible fits.

Only partly successful.

My legs are bent in front of the fridge, my back rests against the door, and the laptop is on my lap.

Start-up life on the Côte d’Azur.

You have to start somewhere. And I want to do this properly. No mistakes at the beginning that become expensive later. No falling in love with a name and then discovering it belongs to someone else. No building a website, commissioning an app and, six months later, receiving a letter from a law firm whose opening pleasantries cost roughly three thousand euros.

So. Trademark search.

One Voice.

I settled on the name during the flight. As far as I’m concerned, that settles it.

Once I have properly made up my mind, I rarely change it. Sometimes this is a strength. Sometimes it is probably why people need lawyers.

I search. Of course One Voice already exists. The world has named almost everything by now.

I find a company that helps other companies work more efficiently and make the most of their financial potential. This reassures me. Nobody is going to download my app by mistake while trying to streamline their cost structure.

Then I find an event for voice actors. Also One Voice. I like this rather better. People who lend out their voices for a living apparently share one between them.

And somewhere in America there is a children’s choir with the same name.

I look at the children on the screen. They do not appear to be on the verge of instructing an international intellectual property firm.

If an American children’s choir ever sues me over the name One Voice, it would at least be a kind of publicity suited to my sense of humour.

German App Founder in Legal Battle with Singing Eight-Year-Olds.

There might even be press coverage.

I keep searching. Trademarks. Word marks. Figurative marks. Words with pictures. Classes. Goods. Services.

A remarkable amount of starting a business seems to consist of finding out which drawer you belong in.

I click through logos. Circles. More circles. People in circles. Circles around people. Three circles that apparently mean community. Five circles that probably mean international community.

I decide: One Voice will not have a circle.

There must be another way to draw people belonging together.

A decision with a rather short life expectancy.

But here on this kitchen floor, I am certain. About the name, at least. The longer I see it among all the other names, the more I want to keep it.

It is big enough for what this could become. And small enough for what it is: a woman on a kitchen floor in Cannes with cold tiles under her thighs.

I could keep researching. Another database. Another similar name. Another risk.

You can put off starting a business indefinitely if you call it being thorough.

Liking the name doesn’t answer all the questions. Even so, I decide to go ahead with the application.

I fill in the trademark application for One Voice and choose the classes of goods and services I want it to cover.

Then I click Pay.

And for the first time, One Voice costs money.

Not much. But money has a remarkable talent for turning thoughts into facts.

A moment ago, One Voice was a name in my head. Now it is on an invoice.

From here on, we pay.

Development. Design. Servers. Lawyers. App stores. Domains. And, presumably, a great many things I don’t yet know cost money.

For the time being, nothing comes in.

As business models go, it is at least easy to grasp.

You send money.

For a moment I wonder whether I really want to do this. And immediately afterwards, why I am so quick to start things like this in the first place.

I know very few people who sit on a kitchen floor in the morning, without anyone having asked them to, and begin putting their own money into an idea nobody knows will work.

Most people in Cannes are probably buying shoes. Or a handbag.

I am paying for a trademark application.

I recognise the sequence. First, an idea. Then it grows legs. And before long I am running after it, paying its bills.

Courage would be the flattering explanation. Impatience would not be entirely wrong either.

Somewhere inside me sits a small, poorly trained board of directors whose immediate response to every new idea is:

Do it.

We’ll discuss the funding later.

Then the door moves against my back. Slowly, laptop and all, I am pushed across the floor.

My friend is awake. She is looking for me.

It turns out you really can lose a whole person in twenty square metres.

“What exactly are you doing down there?”

I turn the laptop towards her.

“I’ve put in the application for One Voice.”

She glances at the screen. Then at me. Then back at the screen.

“Right.”

To this day, it remains one of the more sensible responses to this business.

I am at the dentist’s, cutting out my logo.
Other people are waiting for treatment. I am removing a background. Both require precision, though I hope my dentist will have less to undo afterwards than I do.

One Voice.
I filed the trademark application in Cannes.
On the kitchen floor. That was also where the first rough logo took shape. Rough, but at least I could finally look at my idea.
Now I am tidying up the edges.

I use Photoshop. Old school. I am a photographer, after all. The artificial intelligence involved here is my belief that I will finish before I’m called in.
I zoom in, cut around an edge, zoom out again. Orange. The lettering. The dot. I check the spacing. Before long, spacing is all I can see.
At some point I have to look at the whole logo again.
Oh yes. One Voice. That was the point.

I can work anywhere. At home, of course. Though I do wonder how much home a home office actually needs. A temporary home in Cannes will do. A kitchen floor. Apparently even a waiting room, provided nobody expects me to open my mouth just yet.

The logo takes its final shape.
Now I want to move through an app that doesn’t exist.
I look for a program that will let me build screens and link them together. I find Axure and give it a try.
An interface. Tools. Possibilities, only a fraction of which I need, and a smaller fraction of which I understand.

I begin.
Create a page. Put something on it. Add a button. Decide where it should lead.
As I work my way through the program, something starts to feel familiar.

We used to develop quiz shows using animated PowerPoint presentations. Questions, answers, scores, transitions. What do you see first? What gets revealed when? What happens after a decision?
On Anno Domini, contestants had to put events in chronological order. We made the pilot and designed a complete technical system to run the game. My colleague and I.
Though, in the interests of historical accuracy, I should briefly explain the division of labour.
He immersed himself in the technology. The moment there was a new trick, he knew it. Often, before I had even realised something was possible, he could demonstrate it.
He was an amateur magician.
That explains quite a lot.

I had ideas and wanted to know what we could do with them. A productive combination: someone who knew the technical possibilities, and someone who kept coming up with more things to try.
Dietlinde Stroh helped him, of course.
I am briefly referring to myself in the third person. It makes the achievement sound independently verified.
We had to bring everything together. The contestants needed to understand what to do. The audience needed to follow. The game system had to respond. And the camera had to be pointing at wherever something was happening.
What happens next?
Who sets it off?
Who needs to see it?
And what do we do when somebody does something we haven’t planned for?
Contestants are very good at that.
People using an app probably are too.

These days my colleague is a coach. He still works magic, only on another level. Once, he persuaded PowerPoint to do improbable things. Now he works with people. I imagine they refuse to follow the intended sequence just as often.
I have ended up somewhere else too.
He helps people move forward. I want them to find a choir. Both of us are working on movement. Mine also requires location access.

Now I am sitting in front of Axure and have to work out the tricks myself.
This is the drawback of personal development: occasionally you miss your colleague.
I link a button to the next screen and try it.
Nothing.
I click again.
Still nothing. But more emphatically.
I need to check. Have I selected the right element? Actually made the connection? Where is this button supposed to go?
It is astonishing how many things a simple click depends on when you are responsible for both sides of it.
Then the choir profile opens.
I go back. Click again.
It opens again.
For someone who has put entire television programmes on the air, I am disproportionately pleased with a working button.
I keep building.
On the map, people should be able to see where the singing is. A dot leads to a choir. The profile needs the things I would want to know before turning up somewhere.
Where do you rehearse?
When?
Can I come?
Who do I ask?

With a quiz, I had to imagine a contestant facing the next challenge. What they knew at that moment. What they were missing. How much explanation they could take before suspense became an instruction manual.
Now I try to see One Voice through the eyes of someone who knows nothing about all my deliberations. They open the app because they want to sing. They shouldn’t have to read the story of my business first.
A healthy little blow to the ego.

I move things around, link the screens and click my way through my own idea. Occasionally I end up somewhere I didn’t mean to go.
I know that from television too.
Only here I can take myself back.

Apparently three decades of professional experience are sitting at the screen with me. Thinking in pictures. Sequences. Anticipating decisions. I have to learn the program, but I am not starting from scratch with the work.
Surely an app can’t be harder than a quiz show with contestants, game systems, an audience and camera angles.
A sentence I will be careful not to say to a developer.
It helps me, though.
Back then, admittedly, we had a magician.
Today we have me.
I should at least know where Undo is.

Gradually, the prototype acquires a sequence. I have something to show. Someone can click through it and tell me where they get stuck. Before any actual coding begins, I have a sense of what I want to commission.
On Anno Domini, we had to put events in the right order.
Here, I am trying to do it with my own.
Name.
Logo.
Clickable prototype.
Development.
Dentist, somewhere in between.
Unfortunately, there is no button to skip that bit.

Professionally, I have never been especially interested in perfect people.

People who have everything under control are pleasant. They arrive on time, know their lines, function under pressure and return water bottles to approximately where they found them. For a production, such people are a gift. For a story, rather less so.

I am interested in the moment something begins to give.

A plan.

A relationship.

A team.

A mood.

And then the question:

What do people do with one another when things get difficult?

I am producing a television celebration of Jürgen von der Lippe’s seventieth birthday.

Seventy.

For a comedian, a difficult age to turn into a television programme.

You are meant to celebrate.

Look back.

Move people.

But not for too long, because somebody needs to be funny again afterwards.

There are friends.

Colleagues.

People who have been there along the way.

Very different performers.

People with shared histories.

People with histories of their own.

People who have known Jürgen for decades.

People who have prepared something for the evening.

People accustomed to being the centre of attention themselves.

The whole thing is meant to be big.

Warm.

Funny.

A birthday worthy of the occasion.

Making something both dignified and funny is a challenge family celebrations have been failing for centuries.

There is something else, too.

Something is wrong inside the company.

Trust and mistrust lie remarkably close together.

There are old connections.

Loyalties.

Fears.

Things people say.

And more things they don’t.

People watch one another.

They talk to one another and about one another at the same time.

Information becomes power.

Closeness becomes grounds for suspicion.

Sometimes it feels less like television production than a very poorly equipped intelligence service.

I am sitting in the middle of it.

And I have to bear it.

Because the programme still has to be made.

This is one of the peculiar skills you acquire as a producer:

You can know that something is fundamentally wrong and still ask whether the next video insert could please be ready now.

It is called professionalism. Or denial with a running order.

Then the recording begins. And it is difficult. Not a disaster. Disasters are easier in television. At least everyone knows something is going wrong. Harder are the shows where almost everything works, but nothing quite breathes together.

One guest goes down well. So does the next. A story works. Then another doesn’t. A moment is deeply emotional. The next person tries to catch that emotion with a joke and lands somewhere between a punchline and a fire exit.

From the outside, this can look like failure. Anyone who has worked in television for a long time knows an uncomfortable rule, though: the harder a programme feels to make, the better its ratings may turn out to be. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes you tell yourself it is so you can sleep at night.

Neither helps me this evening. I am sitting there, feeling it: this programme is not holding together.

Then something happens that appears in no running order. One of the performers we have invited begins to hold it together. She isn’t the host. She isn’t responsible. Nobody has asked her to do this. She is one guest among many. She could do her bit, be pleasant, laugh, say goodbye and go home.

Entirely reasonable. Nobody could fault her. But she does something else. She notices what the room is missing.

It is hard to describe because it doesn’t look like leadership. She doesn’t take over. Doesn’t push to the front. Doesn’t correct anybody. Doesn’t seize the wheel.

She makes small interventions. A sentence. A glance. A response. A joke exactly where something has become too heavy. Then she lets another moment stand. She doesn’t immediately turn every hurt into comedy. Nor does she build a monument to it. She finds a thread. Humour. Not an escape route. A connection.

I feel it while we are recording. Suddenly someone is reading the room. Not just her own performance. The room. That is different.

Later, in the edit, I see it more clearly. You can dissect television without mercy in an edit suite. You see who opened a moment up. Who closed it down. Who is merely waiting for their cue. Who listens. Who notices that someone else is falling. And who catches them without making a scene of it.

This performer runs through the programme like an invisible thread. Not because she speaks the most. Because she keeps joining things that are threatening to come apart.

In the end, that thread does a great deal to make the programme work. It stays with me. It still does.

Why does someone do that? Why take responsibility for something that isn’t your responsibility? She could have stayed gracefully out of it. People are very good at that. We have excellent sentences for it. Not my job. I’m not responsible for that. That wasn’t what we agreed. I’d rather not get involved. On this programme, I even heard: I’d want extra money for that.

Not all of it entirely reasonable. And often fatal to any sense of doing something together.

She does the opposite. She notices something is missing. And instead of pointing out the gap, she fills it. I find that fascinating.

Because this is a kind of leadership we talk about far too little. Without a title. Without an announcement. Without power.

Someone sees a fragile situation and, for a moment, takes responsibility for keeping it from breaking. Just as much as is needed. No more.

I think these are the people I keep looking for in my working life. People whose first question in a difficult moment is not “How do I come out of this looking good?” but “What does this room need now?” Later, I ask the performer about that day and why she did it. She cannot remember the programme.

I have watched so many different people in front of a camera, and I remember the situations very clearly. You can be extremely pleasant and still see only yourself. You can be prickly, demanding and awkward, and carry something for other people at a crucial moment. It is the second kind who interest me. Because I learnt very early to watch rooms. Who is tense? Who is withdrawing? Who is getting louder? What is shifting? What isn’t being said?

For a long time, I think of this as a professional skill. Producers need to read a mood. True enough. But it probably goes back further. People who know insecurity often become good observers. Not automatically good people. That would be convenient. But good observers. You notice early when something changes. A voice. A look. A door. Sometimes the ability helps you later at work. Sometimes it drives you mad. Mostly both.

I think about that birthday while thinking about One Voice. An app can organise a great deal. Who. Where. When. How far away. Which voice they need. Where the rehearsal is. That is the technology.

The interesting part comes afterwards.

A person walks into a room. What happens then cannot be programmed. You can make an encounter possible. People have to make the community themselves. It doesn’t always take grand gestures. Often, someone noticing the room is enough.

Something is coming apart here.

Someone is standing on the outside here.

A sentence is missing here.

This needs some humour.

Today I write something down again.

Not a feature.

Not a function.

Not a business model.

Just a sentence:

I am not interested in how perfect people are. I am interested in what they do with one another when things get difficult.

Not immediately useful for building an app.

Rather precise, though, about why I want to build it.

I have a weakness for rooms you can’t simply walk into. It is not an especially endearing quality. Some people see a closed door and think: closed. I think: why?

Many years ago, I am working as a set designer on Verdi’s Nabucco.

Hans Kresnik is directing.

Kresnik could walk into a room and, within minutes, make everyone else look as though their opinions were on loan. He was radical, exhausting, funny, intelligent, at times unbearable. Above all, he distrusted any form of decoration that could not also be used as a weapon.

In our production, the prisoners’ chorus is seated in the Hofbräuhaus.

Munich. Beer-hall benches. Male bodies. Beer-hall bonhomie, with an operatic brief.

I am making the video installations.

One of the soloists is meant to have an image projected onto her dress. She refuses. There are discussions that rapidly cease to be discussions. People who usually talk about artistic freedom discover very precise limits.

The day before the premiere, we are suspended. The word sounds cleaner than the thing itself. We are thrown out. Of Nabucco, of all things. With its prisoners’ chorus.

I could claim I appreciated the irony at once. I didn’t. I am angry. Anger is useful. It makes you feel you still have options. So I stand outside the Saarländisches Staatstheater and film the sky. Just the sky. I take the footage, edit it onto tape and go to the premiere, although officially I have no business being there.

Just before it begins, I secretly swap the cassette. Then the sky above the theatre appears above the Hofbräuhaus. To the audience, it is probably an image. To me, it is an insult. If this theatre finds our work so intolerable, it can spend at least one evening looking at how little separates it from a beer hall.

At the time, I think I am quite brave. One of those misunderstandings that can look good for years. I have often thought of myself as rebellious. Independent. Hard to impress. Someone who won’t bend. These days, I notice how often I was left standing outside doors I had just slammed shut with considerable conviction. The only trouble with my independence was that I would very much have liked to belong. I just didn’t know how. So I got my rejection in first.

From the outside, that can look like principle. From the inside, it can look quite different.

Years later, I am a television producer and come across an actual prisoners’ choir. No scenery this time. No beer-hall benches. No soloist. A prison.

I want to make a film about it. This is the moment that interests me: people whose days are regulated down to the smallest detail stand together and make something that only works if they listen to one another. I want to get inside. Of course I do.

I don’t get inside.

That could have been a warning.

It wasn’t.

After a while, a closed door begins to feel personal.

The choir director I am in touch with is a man who goes his own way. Years later, during the pandemic, he will register his choir rehearsals as demonstrations so that his singers can carry on singing together outdoors.

I still think it is wonderful.

Not because of the loophole.

Because of the thought behind it.

Singing as assembly.

A voice as a public right.

People standing in a square, saying with their bodies: we belong together, although we are not the same.

That comes very close to politics.

Closer still to a choir.

In prison, it acquires a different edge.

A person is not simply sitting beside another person there.

He is there because something happened.

An act. A verdict. A story that eventually covers the whole person like an ill-fitting uniform.

And now that same person is expected to listen for another person’s breath.

To wait for his entrance.

To hold his own note without drowning everyone else out.

For a leisure activity, a choir demands quite a lot of social competence.

Above all, it requires you to be there.

Someone who is missing is actually missing.

Not morally.

Acoustically.

I like that.

A choir does not automatically make someone a better person. That would be too easy. But it does turn a case file back into a body. Someone is standing there. With a ribcage. With breath. With a voice that can come in too early, too late or exactly on time. That is more than a case file can do.

I spend a long time thinking about rooms like these. Rooms people are locked inside. Rooms people want to leave. Rooms you cannot get into.

I know the feeling of a door closing. I know darkness. I know counting. That is enough for today.

Later, I start a choir for people with dementia. At the time, I don’t connect these things.

Why would I? A prison is a prison. Dementia is an illness. An opera is an opera. Life stays tidy as long as you keep your experiences in separate drawers.

Experiences rarely stay put.

One day, a man in the dementia choir is searching for words as we talk. His wife helps him. She knows this. She waits a moment, then takes over the sentence and sets its ending down for him.

Later, we sing. He knows the song. Not just the first line. The whole song.

His wife gets stuck at one point. He doesn’t. For a few seconds, the balance between them shifts.

No miracle. No cure. No heartwarming television moment with music underneath. Just a man who knows the next line. I see his wife look across at him. And I remember that look. Those are the looks that interest me.

The roles slip out of place.

A person can lose a great deal. Their job. Their security. Their reputation. Their memory. Their place in society. And still there are situations in which the first thing they are is not what they lack, but what they bring.

I think that is why choirs won’t leave me alone.

For a few minutes, people standing beside one another become something none of them could make alone.

When I work on One Voice now, I think of those rooms.

Of the sky above the beer hall.

Of the prison I couldn’t get into.

Of the man who knew the next line.

Tomorrow, democracy.

We are in a coach on a closed motorway, going nowhere.

Flashing orange lights ahead. Cars behind. Us in between.

There has been a serious accident further up the road. The police have closed it. Nobody knows how long we will be here.

On the coach is a choir for people with dementia. I am accompanying them for the day.

Outside, orange lights flash.

Inside, people are getting restless.

A man sits up.

“The Russians are coming!”

He is not making a joke.

I look out of the window. Road crews. Police. Warning lights.

“No,” I say. “Those are the Allies.”

He looks at me.

“They’re getting us out of here.”

He looks back at the orange lights.

That is enough for him.

For now.

We wait.

And while we wait, I think about the German Television Awards.

The nominations have been announced. I read the names, the programmes, the actors and actresses, and think: I don’t care who wins.

I care about the people. Very much.

I have known this industry for three decades. I know what individuals can achieve.

An actor can carry a film.

A director can fight an idea through resistance.

A writer can see something nobody has seen before.

A producer can spend five years making sure an idea becomes something real at all.

There are people without whom certain works would never have existed.

You don’t have to diminish that to question the worship of stars.

Quite the opposite.

The problem begins when an exceptional achievement becomes a false story.

The story of the one person who made it all.

I know sentences like these:

“They’re hosting this year. They still need an award.”

“As long as we mention them. That will have to do.”

Or:

“We mustn’t show a clip from that programme. Otherwise nobody will understand why we didn’t give them a prize.”

And this one:

“She doesn’t sell anymore.”

A sentence from a stock-control meeting.

Four words, and a performer becomes a product with falling demand.

That is what frightens me about the cult of the star.

It elevates people, then makes that elevation the thing that puts them at risk.

Being made visible can bring extraordinary recognition.

Being defined entirely by visibility makes you dependent on it.

Outside, the lights flash.

“The Russians are coming!”

“Allies.”

“Oh, right.”

We have a system now.

A star is a system too.

A face onto which we project a complicated achievement.

There is even some sense in it.

It is easier to tell the story of one face than a hundred names.

A vision often needs someone to stand for it.

A film needs decisions.

A shoot needs direction.

An idea needs someone to say: this way.

Community alone makes nothing.

It can hold things up.

It can also hold things back, bury them in procedure, talk them to death.

Something new often begins with one person.

Someone sees something.

Someone wants something.

Someone risks something.

Someone persists long after other people would have stopped.

But even the most determined individual never works in a vacuum.

An actress can give an extraordinary performance in a scene.

Someone wrote it.

Someone cast it.

Someone lit it.

Someone built the room.

Someone recorded the sound.

Someone in the edit decided how long to hold her gaze.

Someone organised the production so that this one moment could happen at all.

None of this diminishes her achievement.

It lets us see the whole of it.

That is the point.

Not that everyone is equally important.

Not at every moment, they aren’t.

Not that everyone contributes the same thing.

That isn’t true either.

But this:

People can matter differently to a piece of work without being worth more or less as human beings.

One person can lead.

Another can shine.

One person can be the reason a work exists.

And we can still see that even a great individual achievement needs things around it.

Trust.
Disagreement.
Craft.
Time.
Money.
Patience.
People.

One person. One prize. One achievement.

That is how we tell the story of success.

I am tired of that story.

So I wouldn’t abolish the Television Awards.

I would rebuild them.

Radically.

There would still be categories.

Audience Success.
Commercial Success.
Innovation.
Narrative Risk.
Excellence in Craft.
Tradition.
Social Impact.

And a category for productions that made something feel bigger than the small budget they had to make it with.

Three works nominated in each category.

All three teams invited.

Everyone.

I want a full stage.

Cast. Direction. Writing. Production. Camera. Sound. Editing. Production design. Costume. Hair and make-up. Production management. Production assistants.

People whose names we know. And people whose names we never learn.

Each team chooses one person from among them beforehand.

Not automatically the star.

Not the least visible person as a gesture.

The person the team can say this to:

You gave this work something that made all the difference to us.

That could be the lead actress.

Of course it could.

It could be the writer. The director. The producer. Someone from make-up. The editor. A production assistant.

The choice does not mean:

You are worth more than we are.

It means:

You did something special for this work.

You tell the story tonight.

And that person gets time.

Nothing to prove.

They tell us what made this work special for the team.

They can show a scene.

Bring a film.

Explain what nearly defeated them.

Bring the whole team onto the stage.

Give their time to someone else.

They can say:

The person who made the difference to this film is standing two rows behind me tonight.

Afterwards, the audience judges the work.

Not the best speech.

Not the most famous name.

Not the most accomplished self-promotion.

The film.

Three works.

Three teams.

Three different stories of how something came into being.

Only then does the audience decide.

Of course there would still be a jury.

For tradition’s sake, if nothing else.

It gets a prize of its own.

It can award that itself.

No criteria.

No transparency.

No excuses.

Some traditions must be preserved.

Meanwhile, nothing on the coach is theoretical.

One person understands the situation differently from me.

Another needs help.

Someone grows restless.

Someone calms him.

Outside, people are working to reopen a road after a serious accident.

We don’t know their names.

And here, too, not everyone is equally important at every moment.

Someone makes a decision.

Someone takes responsibility.

Someone reassures.

Someone sings.

Someone waits.

Someone bears what is happening.

This is no romantic vision of community.

It is something plainer.

People depend on one another.

And we still need individuals who act.

Neither truth cancels out the other.

That is where the tension lies.

We like to tell ourselves stories about the strong individual.

My success.
My career.
My idea.
My achievement.
My name.

And we are just as fond of stories about community, as though being together were enough, by itself, to bring something into being.

Both are too easy.

The truth lies somewhere between them.

We need the person who says, “This way.” And the people without whom nobody gets there.

The man behind me sees the orange lights again.

“The Russians are coming!”

I turn round.

“Those are the Allies.”

He nods.

And suddenly he doesn’t seem confused to me at all.

He sees a threatening situation and looks for a story that will help him understand it.

We all do that.

We tell stories to give an untidy world some order.

Television does it for a living.

And one of its oldest stories goes like this:

There is the star.
Look at him.
He has won.

It is a simple story.

Only an incomplete one.

Because sometimes the person standing there really is the one without whom the work would never have existed.

Then let him stand there.

Let him be celebrated.

But not as proof that the others count for less.

As part of a larger truth.

One person stands at the front.
Many stand behind him.
One person saw something.
Many helped make it real.

One person holds the award.
Without the others, his hands would be empty.

I look outside again.

The lights are still flashing.

Orange.

The Allies are nothing if not persistent.

And suddenly I am back with One Voice.

I am building a platform for community and noticing how quickly the word itself becomes a claim.

Community is not automatically good.

It has no morality of its own.

It can support a person and obstruct an idea. It can be brave and cowardly. It can send someone to the front and leave them standing there alone.

One Voice must not become an app in which everybody is the same.

We aren’t.

We can do different amounts. We want different amounts.

One person sings the first line.
Another listens for a while.
One starts a choir.
Another finds a room.
One has an idea nobody has had before.
Another recognises what it could become.

What matters is something else:

That our differences do not become a ranking of our worth.

That someone can stand at the front without making anyone else smaller.

That one voice can be heard without silencing another.

That asks more of us than community.

It asks us to play together.

And with that, I have at least made one business decision today.

The orange stays in the logo. Looking out of this window, that feels exactly right.

Nothing discreet about it.

It needs to flash.

In case the Russians come.

“Fire”.

The first song, and she has me.

I am in Cologne, watching Alison Moyet. On stage is a woman who laughs, dances, catches people’s eyes and fills the entire room with her voice. There is a lightness about her. Quite a combination, with a voice like that.

I listen. I watch. It is good to give someone else the stage for an evening. Starting a business offers quite enough opportunities to think about yourself.

Does the idea make sense?
Does anyone understand what I mean?
How can I explain it better?

Alison Moyet sings.

That helps.

Between songs, she talks about how everyone can sing. How singing together connects people. Cologne, predictably, does not need asking twice.

Around me are people from all over Germany. Different generations, different styles. I have rarely seen such a varied audience. Everyone has taken their own route here, brought their own history, their own day.

Now they are singing together.

I don’t know these people. And yet, in this moment, I feel connected to them. It takes remarkably little explaining.

For One Voice, I keep trying to find words for this feeling. I write about encounters, community, people finding one another through singing. These words are easy to put on a page. Then they sit there, looking a little like somebody’s homepage.

Here, they have voices.

And I am standing among them.

“The Impervious Me” stays with me in particular. Before the song, Alison Moyet talks about the protective layers we acquire. About trying to keep hurt out without becoming impossible to reach.

That thought stays.

If you want to find people, you have to let them see you somehow. It sounds manageable enough. Until you are standing outside a door, and everyone on the other side already knows one another.

Can I just walk in?
Am I good enough to sing here?
What if I feel uncomfortable?

Finding an address is a beginning. Finding the courage to go is part of it too. I want to remember that as I build One Voice. Behind every profile, every search box, every little dot on a map, there will eventually be a person deciding whether to set off.

I think of an interview in which Alison Moyet spoke about being judged for her appearance even as a child. Too tall, too broad, too heavy. Other people seem to form very precise opinions, very early, about how much space someone is allowed to occupy.

Here, she takes up an entire stage.

With her voice. Her humour. Her pleasure in what she does.

I watch her and think how exhausting it is to keep checking whether you fit. That is another reason I want One Voice to help people find places where they can arrive with their own voices. Uncertainties included. Oddities included. You bring the whole lot with you anyway.

You can’t build a concert evening into an app. Nor, unfortunately, Alison Moyet.

But I can help people find opportunities to sing together. Make it a little easier to get there. Whatever happens between them after that belongs to them.

Last night in Cologne, I could feel again why I want to do this.

And something occurs to me: I keep writing “We still need to…”

It already sounds like a small team. Like someone else thinking alongside me, disagreeing, being pleased too when something works.

So far, “we” is mostly me.

I want to bring people together, while still trying to manage rather a lot on my own. There is a certain comedy in that. I would like someone to share it with. The work, too.

I need someone to join me. Someone with ideas of their own. Someone who comes to care about One Voice. Someone I can talk to about what happens next, without having to supply both sides of the conversation myself.

So I still need to find someone.

So that one day I can write “we” and mean us.