Will they be pleased for him? Or will they notice what we do: the way the other nine children in his class at Christ’s College in Oxford stifle their laugher every time he feels compelled to get up and sing?

No matter, though, because for the Rock School teacher, Mr Simmons — aka Gene Simmons from Kiss — these are the “loser” qualities that make Josh an ideal lead singer for the task in hand: to take ten posh schoolchildren who don’t much care for rock and get them ready in six weeks for a prestigious support slot alongside Mötorhead.

At times you feel like stepping into the television set and asking Simmons what he hopes will be achieved by all this. Isn’t the world already overrun with small children who want to sing on telly? What purpose could possibly be served by finding the only ten children in modern education who don’t already like popular music, then getting them to form a band? Such questions, alas, would shatter the reasoning on which Rock School has been constructed. Nor would Simmons thank you for pointing out that his methods are hopelessly out of date. Let’s bear in mind here that McFly and Busted — two successful teenage bands of recent years — did not actually comprise ugly outsiders eager to find redemption in the primal clatter of rock’n’roll. These were groups who emerged not from a rock school but from a London drama school.

A look at this autumn’s album releases suggests that if they wanted to achieve chart stardom they might have been better off with Danny Boy and The Lord is My Shepherd, tunes far more in keeping with the Christ’s College music curriculum as it was before Simmons’s arrival.

Next month Universal will sink £500,000 in promotional cash into the Choirboys, two 12-year-olds and an 11-year-old who, along with a poperatic treatment of Tears in Heaven, have tackled the aforementioned songs on their eponymous debut.

Not to be outdone, Sony/BMG haved signed a £2 million deal with the tousle-haired heart-throb Joseph McManners, whose album In Dreams mixes granny catnip such as Bright Eyes with Pie Jesu and Howard Goodall’s Psalm 23.

Hoping to take the so-called “classical crossover" genre to a more upmarket crowd is the “little Pavarotti” Alex Prior, whose Just a Boy contains some of the more than 50 classical compositions he has completed in his 12 years.

With record companies having to work harder than ever to shift “physical product”, the importance of projects such as these can’t be underestimated. The special relationship enjoyed by singing children and sentimental grannies is a sure pre-Christmas moneyspinner.

For the rest of us, though, the idea of listening to a child singing is marginally preferable to chewing tinfoil. Of course, there have been exceptions.

Most people would admit that Hanson’s MMMBop is a thing of life-affirming wonder, a moment of odds-confounding serendipity which the poor Hanson brothers are surely doomed never to repeat. Michael Jackson’s unhappy childhood led him to live his life in reverse, ensuring that I Want You Back and Ben were drenched with the anguish of decades, while You are Not Alone and Heal the World sound like nothing more than the best efforts of an ailing Teletubbie.

In 1972, Donny Osmond’s Puppy Love worked because he was singing about something that you could believe coming from a boy of his age. That same year, when EMI attempted to replicate the formula with Darren Burn, a BBC Man Alive documentary captured the whole folly in painful detail.

Darren’s first single was Something’s Gotten Hold of my Heart. Had the young Michael Jackson recorded Gene Pitney’s depiction of love as a terrifying affliction the results would have surely been spine-tingling. Alas, on his rendition, Darren might as well have been singing that morning’s FT-SE index.