Jerry Springer, trash TV personified, is the perfect subject for satirical treatment

You might think twice about putting a nappy fetishist centre stage in an opera. But the very funny, very foul-mouthed, superbly sung Jerry Springer: The Opera did exactly that, and turned out to be one of the most original events staged last year. But the work was unfinished.

Now this satirical tribute to trash telly is coming back, in an extended version, to the Battersea Arts Centre. It will not be short of an audience. For the concert performances last August there was no official press night and not much coverage, but the word of mouth was so enthusiastic that the show sold out without being advertised. Soon Hal Prince was emailing the composer, asking what was going on. Nicholas Hytner, who (encouragingly for frequenters of the South Bank) took the trouble to see the show, has said that the National would be interested in commissioning the composer’s next opera.

That composer is Richard Thomas. He is – in a laid-back way – a man with a mission. He wants to prove to doubters that opera need not be posh, melancholy and expensive. It can be demotic, caustic and cheap.

Tom Morris, the artistic director at Battersea who commissioned the work, talks of Thomas’s extraordinary gift for ‘matching registers of speech to melody’ and of the sheer beauty of his harmonies. In the sobbing confessionals, the violent confrontations, the impassioned soliloquies played out in front of Springer, Thomas has found a perfect operatic subject.

After all, what better form than opera to project melodramatic encounters in which ‘people are always screaming at each other and you can’t understand a word they say’? And the roaring participation of Springer audiences make Thomas’s show ideal for live performance.

Thomas’s route to opera was idiosyncratic. He studied classical piano as a child, but moved into jazz and rock, writing songs for bands. And then he took to comedy, working as part of a musical-based double-act – ‘lots of synchronised swimming over the keyboard’.

He’s made a trance version of the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s requiem; he’s worked with Harry Hill; he’s turned out a stream of television jingles. He’s a big fan of the Sex Pistols, but found his all-time showstopper when, while working as an ice-cream seller in Vienna, he first heard Mozart’s Queen of the Night’s aria. At the moment, he’s working on The Frank Skinner Show, turning out ‘soundulikes’ – of anything from the Stones to Planet of the Apes .

The Springer idea has its roots in his comedy life, which made him ‘paranoid about boring an audience’. He had the brilliant idea of putting down hecklers by employing a singer to hurl back coloratura insults. In exquisite diction and perfect phrasing, the soprano used to warble at a member of the audience: ‘Your mother sucks cock.’

Struck by the concept, Tom Morris suggested to Thomas that he develop it. The result was a song-cycle called Tourette’s Diva: 12 arias in unrelated keys and tempi in which two mezzos engaged in a frenetic sparring match. The language was demotic; the pace was rapid; the music beautiful. Thanks, Morris guesses, to Thomas’s exceptional gift for ‘matching registers of speech to melody’, it was an instant success. Gaining in confidence, Thomas came up with the idea for a piece featuring Springer, whom he thinks of as part-Mephistopheles, part-working-class hero.

He’d done his homework on the material: hours of watching the show in the small hours when pissed. He had an exact idea of the music he wanted to produce. There has, he points out, been a revolution in musical style since most big musicals were written. And a change of attitude in listening to music which comes in part form exposure to television: ‘If you watch three minutes of ads, you’ll probably see 30 or 40 styles of music.’ He wanted to get a musical equivalent of the crude, snap edits in the Springer show, so he used brutal cuts, and avoided cadences. When he composed a big number featuring a would-be pole dancer, he made it swell like ‘classic cheesy music theatre’, and then – at a point when the song could run for another minute – cut it short. ‘It’s like graffiti-ing your own work.’

He uses singers with wonderful voices, but no one ‘looks as if they’ve been sitting under a sun-lamp for the last year’. He likes it when his actors are ‘fat, gangly and awkward’; he likes them in their early middle age. The result is a show that looks as well as sounds authentic, that is to say grotesque, raunchy, passionate.

I saw it last summer, in a packed, rapt auditorium. It felt like a mass for the masses, with the Springer figure identifying with Christ and the opening chorus sobbing ‘Jerry’ with vowels so elongated that it sounded like ‘Kyrie’.

‘I’m not a Catholic but I do like a requiem,’ says Thomas. And it felt liberatingly irreverent. The guests included a ‘chick with a dick’, a backwoodsman who turned out to really like flowers but not to care for people, and a chorus line of Ku Klux Klansmen who jigged as they chanted ‘Jews’n’ blacks can go to hell. New York Democrats as well’. There was a crucial, thrilling song called ‘This Is My Jerry Springer Moment’. And there was Diaper Man: a huge bloke who stripped down to a chunky pair of nappies and, with a dummy round his neck and a baby bonnet on his head, pleaded with his girlfriend to pin him up.

The show has been expanded since then, greatly helped by the development process – a series of public try-outs of work in progress – and the initiative of Battersea. Thomas offered little tasters from his first draft there, giving a beer away to anyone in the audience who came up with suggestions. Stewart Lee – Lee and Herring’s Fist of Fun and other comedy adventures – has become involved, contributing to the libretto and directing. Avalon Promotions and Us Productions have invested in the show. But production money is needed if this is to have a further life. It deserves one.

The lazy convention has it that while films are full of innovation, theatre is creaking to a halt, shackled to the past. But it would be hard to find a movie to match this for invention and imagination.

Jerry Springer: The Opera will be at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) from 5-23 February