BBC Four
james.woodall
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot, though that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from the hour-long documentary treatment. For blues lovers, it’s a benchmark. “Rock Island Line” dates from the late 1920s and was first recorded in 1934.Billy Bragg dependably and articulately fronted up this BBC Four history of the song, a protest paean to, or (as it might once have been called) a Read more ...
james.woodall
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th anniversary year of their horrible break-up we need reminding of pop’s Biggest Bang in 1963. This was almost the film to do it. Yet for such an explosive moment in cultural history it was curiously downbeat.That might be because, as we were reminded throughout, the group’s genesis was scruffy and full of false starts. Liverpool in the 1950s seemed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a huge Irish cultural phenomenon, and Ardal O’Hanlon was our amiable guide through this brief but illuminating history of them.Taking a break from his Caribbean sojourn in Death in Paradise, in Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party O'Hanlon explained that Ireland in the 1960s was very different to the young, outward-looking country it is now – poor, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Picture this. You’re sailing in the Timor Sea with family and friends on your luxurious yacht, hoiking the occasional plump fish out of the ocean to provide a ready meal washed down with Aussie plonk, when you suddenly chance across a decrepit, broken-down fishing boat crammed with mostly Iraqi refugees. What do you do?There are too many of them to fit on your yacht, so you can either try to tow them to where they want to go (Australia) or, since you’re currently out of radio range of coastguards or police, leave them while you go in search of rescue. Other options might have been tow them Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A picture is worth more than a thousand words, never more so than with the photographs of Don McCullin. The octogenarian photographer’s black-and-white imagery made the Sunday Times colour supplement the talk of international media in the 1970s. McCullin, a North Londoner born and bred, travelled the world’s war zones before coming home 35 years ago to a Somerset world of landscapes and still-lifes, whilst still periodically going off to new conflicts, most recently to Syria and Yemen. With a major retrospective opening at Tate Britain this week, Adrian Sibley’s film followed him as he once Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A bunch of young-ish people stuck in a rambling house in the middle of nowhere, a hatchet-faced senior citizen guarding a hoard of murky secrets, assorted missing persons, a derelict sanatorium, lots of creepy noises and no telephones… hang on, isn’t that exactly the same formula as in the first series of Black Lake? The sense of deja vu in this second season was further enhanced by the presence of Johan (Filip Berg), the arrogant young businessman who was planning to buy the haunted ski resort in series one.The reason Johan has managed to return from the dead is that this is a prequel, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fired by the spirit of the MR James ghost stories which used to be a Christmas staple on the BBC, Mark Gatiss conceived this amusing bonne bouche as both a seasonal chiller and a nod to the ghost of broadcasting past. In passing, he also managed to shoehorn in a survey of changes in social and sexual mores which have occurred over the last 40 years.His vehicle for this was the venerable thespian Aubrey Judd, host of the long-running radio show The Dead Room when he's not picking up TV bit-parts as "dementia man 2". As he described it himself, in his fulsome and fruity and r-rolling baritone Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. In this second instalment of Neil Brand’s brilliant three-part history, he looked at the genre from the 1940s to the 1960s, from the USA to the UK, as well as voyaging to India and China and dropping in a salut to France.These two decades are labelled the “Second Golden Age”. We bounced straight in with images of New York accompanied by Leonard Bernstein’s euphoric post-war “New York New York”, emblematic of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps belatedly prompted by the release of Barbra Streisand’s new album Walls, the worst-selling disc in her 55 years with Columbia Records, this documentary was an uncritical celebration of Babs’s brilliant career from her first stage appearances in the late Fifties to the joys of Hello, Dolly!, The Way We Were and Yentl. The somewhat arbitrary cut-off date of 1984 meant that we were even able to enjoy a nostalgic blast of “Woman in Love”, from her collaboration album with Barry Gibb, Guilty.These days Streisand (present here only in archive clips) has become a grandiose diva in aspic, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jerusalem! This fact-studded story of 20th century British music told us that the nation's unofficial national anthem, Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s poem, originated in 1916 as a commission from the “Fight for Right” movement. Officials wanted a grand piece of music to boost morale (following the law of unintended consequences, Parry saw to it that Jerusalem became a rallying song for the suffragettes, too). The work of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams was also enlisted to boost the national spirit. Even bureaucracy recognised the potential of music to uplift, encourage, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew? There was no reason at all in it in my way of thinking.” Britain’s very last Tommy was Harry Patch, born in 1898, conscripted in 1916 and still alive on his 111th birthday in 2009. He was one of the witnesses in The Last Tommies, BBC Four’s remarkable work of oral history.The centrepiece of the BBC’s centenary commemoration of the Armistice unspooled over three nights, collating interviews made over 30 years. Its impact may be slightly occluded by Peter Jackson’s unmissable They Shall Not Grow Old this coming Sunday 11 November, which takes Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
You had to keep your eyes skinned. Was that Iris Murdoch or AS Byatt, Kingsley Amis or John Banville, Margaret Atwood or Val McDermid – maybe, even, Joanna Lumley? Tables as far as the eye can see, dressed with white tablecloths and crowded with wine glasses. A glittering banquet with oceans of booze, it seems, mostly champagne, lots of hugging, kissing, shouting and clouds of gossip, all accompanied by television cameras.Barneys, Books and Bust Ups was a vastly entertaining documentary of the (Man) Booker Prize’s first 50 years, narrated in the soothing tones of Kirsty Wark. We witnessed Read more ...