Have you been watching Channel 4's fly-on-the-wall documentary The Family? If not, allow me to fill you in. Nineteen-year-old Emily goes out every night to clubs in Maidstone (AKA Babylon) with names like Paradox and Xanadu, returning home only to sleep, nick her mum's clothes, lose a succession of part-time jobs and mooch around in a constant state of belligerent self-pity. Dad Simon alternates between passive-aggressive nagging and gooey sentimentality. And mum Jane slumps on the sofa in a state of zonked-out resignation. Repeat to fade.
What makes it weirdly compelling is the deftness of the editing and some of the best use of music I've ever encountered on British television. At the end of each episode, some kind of temporary resolution is achieved with the aid of a suitable song, preferably one that one of the characters (yes, they're real people but they're still characters) has chosen to play. In the first episode, Emily and June achieve a tentative rapprochement by singing along to Kate Nash's Foundations, thus making the sentiments ("My fingertips are holding on to/The cracks in our foundations") seem familial rather than romantic, and suddenly, unexpectedly moving.
In another episode, the parents scroll through Simon's MOR-stuffed iTunes folder. Jane chooses Cat Stevens' Father and Son because the Boyzone version reminds her of when the girls were young. "This is a lovely song," she sighs. "No, it's not," says Simon, rightly. "It's about a father who doesn't listen." It's a wonderful, understated moment of spontaneous self-awareness.
Another episode ends with an externally imposed choice, Aimee Mann's unbearably sad Wise Up. Just at the point where the viewer feels like the rowing family members are going around in circles, Mann comes in singing, "It's not going to stop 'til you wise up." At this point I appeared to have something in my eye.
Doubtless, the programme-makers were inspired by the exquisite employment of Wise Up during the pivotal montage in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. That scene was a prime example of what I like to call "montage-rock": the use of an emotive song to articulate what the characters cannot, preferably over a dialogue-free sequence. Hollywood has used it for years but only recently has it become a standard TV trick. It can be used anywhere (Lost's second season opened brilliantly with Mama Cass's Make Your Own Kind of Music), but its natural home is at the end of an episode, where it draws all the narrative threads together.
The archetypal montage-rock moment is probably the placement of Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars in the season two finale of Grey's Anatomy, whose savvy music supervisor, Alexandra Patsavas, previously boosted the sales of several indie acts via her work on the OC.
Montage-rock has now become such a cliche that songs such as Coldplay's Fix You instantly call to mind images of Meredith Grey weeping over a gurney. But, used well, it is remarkably powerful. The bravura finale of Six Feet Under owed much of its emotional kick to Sia's surging Breathe Me, which most viewers would never have heard before. The more common the practice becomes, the greater the pressure on music supervisors to do the unexpected: highlight obscure songs, recontextualise familiar ones, make subtle thematic connections, explore the way music can spring emotional ambushes like nothing else. So tell me when montage-rock has worked for you.
