Observe the two middle fingers of Tony Iommi’s right hand, or what’s left of them after a steel press landed on his hand at the Birmingham factory where he worked. These two fingers represent the decline of heavy industry and the upswing in Britain’s cultural currency because their owner went on to play lead guitar for Black Sabbath; swapping one heavy metal for another.
And so begins Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You (BBC2), an enjoyable gallop through Britain’s pop-cultural output from the 1960s onwards. Doctor Who, JK Rowling, James Bond, the Beatles and the aforementioned heavy metal are all cited as enduring success stories from this new “empire of the imagination”, which sprang up to replace the actual British empire, in steep decline along with its industry.
Although a necessarily brisk tour, taking in manifold views, the details Sandbrook chooses to pick out are always illuminating. The information that movie tycoon J Arthur Rank, he of the burnished gong, was actually a Yorkshire miller who remained ill-at-ease in the glamorous British film industry, despite turning it around with his backing of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, is new to me and has prompted me to learn more. Surely the sign of any good documentary.
I was hooked with these stories alone but the mine cart of Sandbrook’s enthusiasm hurtles onwards to, inevitably, the Beatles. Even this well-trodden tale is given new insight as he describes “an immaculately packaged product” carefully designed by Brian Epstein (he swapped their leather jackets for sharp suits) and exported as quintessentially British around the world.
I love the detail that they “saved the British corduroy industry” according to one reader’s letter in the Times. It isn’t elaborated on, but it will make me look more closely at every old clip of the band to see what they’re wearing.
That image of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, curated by Danny Boyle, (he features in more depth in episode three of this four-parter) also perfectly encapsulates Sandbrook’s idea of a post-industrial Britain, seen through the filter of its cultural output. Those rising chimneys and top-hatted industrialists giving way to a flying Mary Poppins army and battalions of raving teens surrounding Tim Berners-Lee as he pops out of a giant house. I’m looking forward to the next three instalments.
A contribution to our culture we can be less proud of is the overuse of plucking strings and arch voiceovers in our documentaries. There must be another way for the London-centric media to communicate its disdain for the funny provincial folk who don’t understand how editing works. In My Psychic Life (C4) the subjects are clairvoyants and mediums (the difference is never explained) who live in the north of England. Why they have chosen this territory is unclear, but I’m going to assume that there’s a high concentration of mediums there and producers didn’t just see the Phoenix Nights potential in folk from the north lands talking about t’supernatural in their amusing accents.
Depending on your point of view, you might say that people who claim to communicate with the dead are easy targets. But the interviews here are unchallenging, letting the subjects flow freely while all the judgmental ridicule is saved for the edit. No one making the show asks the question: is this all made up, a load of hooey, wish fulfilment at best? Yes, your interviewees might be fame-hungry types who host psychic evenings in hotel lounges, hovering somewhere between showbiz and doing real emotional damage to the vulnerable. But the relationship between the programme makers and their subjects is always uncomfortably patrician v pleb. It is perfectly summed up in a scene featuring the hairdresser and psychic David Traynor.
He comes to London to meet a talent agent and we watch as he sits in a Soho office opposite two smirking urbanites and tries to cold-read them. While I’d usually be on the side of anyone who tries to debunk a self-proclaimed spook, the relationship is so heavily stacked against the show’s subjects, I ended up feeling sorry for him.
Shellie Mcguirke, from Leeds, is so keen to please the programme makers she lets them film her talking to ghost children on town centre benches and even follow her on a date. The “they know what they’re getting into” argument doesn’t wash no matter how many times it’s wheeled out, because the fall-out from appearing in one of these shows can be unforeseen (ironically) and very unpleasant. Yes, they might put “As seen on Channel 4” on their flyers but try telling the subjects of the first Benefits Street (also C4) that they can use the exposure, when they have to move house and take their children out of school because of the abuse they suffer.
And still pluck, pluck, pluck go the strings. There must be a better way to tell these stories.
