The BBC documentary ‘Roxy Music – A Musical History’ achieved something quite
remarkable. The remarkable thing was this: it made a tragic, middle-aged Roxy
fan boy like me turn off after about ten minutes. Had I kept watching, I’m
afraid I might have ended up breaking something in our living room.
Some folk in TV land must think that a definitive template for quality has been established
by programmes like ‘The nation’s 100 favourite telly adverts’ or ‘The greatest-ever
soap villains’, wherein a bunch of well-worn video clips are assembled for the
purpose of showcasing the ‘witty’ and ‘off-the-cuff’ observations of C-list
celebrities. You can tell from their eyes that, generally speaking, these TV talking
heads don’t know (or care) much about the subject matter; they’re just reacting
to clips they’ve been shown five minutes before.
One of
the reasons that online content is often more interesting than TV content is
that the folk who make the online stuff usually care (sometimes to the point of
insanity) about their subject matter. A talking head on TV, by contrast, only really
cares about being a talking head on TV. Such a person will dream of the money
shot, the moment they’ll coin a phrase so cute, pithy and resonant that they’ll
be hired to do a whole bunch more talking head stuff on shows like ‘Britain’s Weirdest
Game Show Contestants.’
I generally avoid this kind of programme, but felt that I could not pass up the
chance to watch an hour devoted to one of my favourite bands. Alas,
merely 600 seconds into the show, having absorbed a series of blows, all of
which sign-posted the grim direction of travel, I had to reach for the remote
and terminate my participation with extreme prejudice. Maybe I should have
watched the whole thing before writing this review, but those 600 seconds contained
quite enough inanity for me to get the gist, featuring as it did some world-class
superficiality from Sadie Frost, Shaun Ryder, Alan McGee, Sian Pattenden and
Emma Dabiri (no … me neither).
The commentary seemed neither apposite nor insightful, but what made it worse was that some of
it was used DURING THE SONGS, the director clearly having interpreted each of
the instrumental passages as an opportunity to insert analysis like this:
"Bryan Ferry wore glitter on his
eyes.”
And this:
"The instruments all had a part
to play in the Roxy sound.”
To anyone interested in finding out about a fantastic band, my advice would be to
avoid this programme. Instead, do yourself a favour and check out some old
clips on youtube. At least that way, you won’t have to encounter a phenomenon
which surely deserves a collective noun, preferably something pejorative and
judgemental to reflect its pestilential vapidity.
How about a jabbering of TV talking heads?
That sounds about right.
There ... I’ve
done something useful with the time I could have spent shouting at the
television.
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