Jerry Springer: The Opera sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it all makes perfect sense to composer Richard Thomas, who is principally to blame for the world premiere of that name at Battersea’s BAC next week.

Camberwell-based Richard, 36, says: “Jerry Springer’s TV show is about these guests coming in screaming at each other and that’s exactly the opera.

The only difference is that in opera you can’t understand what they are saying but in my opera you will be able to.

A lot of the characters on that show are quite tragic but you are laughing and thinking ‘This is awful’. I used to watch Jerry Springer on late-night TV when I was a little drunk after coming back from gigs and thought that would be a great theme for opera.”

Complete with ‘chick with a dick counter-tenor, a Pamper-wearing baritone and an audience psycho tenor’, concert performances of his new work take place as part of the south London venue’s unusual alternative BAC Opera season.

It was the smash-hit success of his equally unorthodox Tourette’s Diva in last year’s programme that emboldened Richard to go ahead with his latest musical sensation.

He says: “With Tourette’s Diva I thought I would write the most uncommercial work I could. It had the cruelest gags and vilest language with at one time one of the cast singing totally obscene taunts at the audience – the audience loved it.”

Jerry Springer: The Opera carries on where its predecessor left off with “infidelity, weird sexual practices and lap dancing of course.

“There’s the familiar theme of guests with guilty secrets – guests who get more and more bizarre. “We have got the money to pay 12 singers so we have a choir in the audience who get up and shout ‘loser’, ‘whore’ and stuff.”

Richard had plenty of experience of hostile audience reaction early on in his career, including his first-ever London gig as part of a duo at a stag night, performing in a boxing ring at the Cafe Royale. He recalls: “We were so young and naive and we died on our arse.

“The bottles came raining over and prostitutes stripped this man naked and his mates literally chucked the guy at us. “It was terrifying.”

Not surprisingly, Richard took to working with stand-up comedy by way of light relief and moved on to writing the music for 16 TV comedy series.

He has worked with Harry Hill, Arthur Smith and Simon Munnery and was music director of Frank Skinner’s Might Skinnerettes in Skinner and Baddiel’s show.

He says: “Working in comedy is very demanding and the top comedians really work hard and are very meticulous – you learn a lot from that.”

And Richard also feels that opera can do with a healthy injection of comedy to get away from the elitist image and take it back to its popular roots. He says: “You can use it for really comic effects. If you do something which seems kind of off-kilter it’s quite liberating. You might as well go the whole hog and be as insane as possible. “The great thing about Battersea is you can try something out on stage and it’s not a do-or-die situation.

“At the same time you will never be bored – I am paranoid about people being bored.”

For the Kombat Theatre production, Richard and writer/director Stewart Lee – himself one half of comedy duo Lee and Herring – will be adding some last minute material in later performances. Mixing up musical styles and expectations means that Richard has also worked on a trance version of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem which has been played in Ibiza as part of a dance album due for release in South Africa and Scandinavia.

He adds: “At the studio I work in Brixton the sound insulation’s pretty bad so you can hear this other music all the time.

“I suppose you could call it crossover – there’s always a positive side.”

Following the reception given to his last opera – which got itself featured on TV in January as part of the six-part series Attention, Scum – he is hopeful that a producer will snap up Jerry Springer: The Opera for its commercial appeal.

If Jerry himself has anything to do with it, they probably will.
Richard says: “The New York Post had a story saying that Jerry Springer had heard about the opera and thought it was a really good idea.”