“Tall and tan and young and lovely …” Seven words are all you need for the most sophisticated of earworms to start whispering its sweet nothings into your ears. And ahhhh, it’s The Girl from Ipanema, the sonic equivalent of being caressed with a palm frond. In three minutes of exquisite American jazz-inflected samba, it contains everything that is the essence of bossa nova: babes bronzing on Copacabana beach, middle classes swaying in suburban 60s America, ice clinking in whisky, João Gilberto and Stan Getz, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, everything that is simple, soft, sultry, and beginning with “s”. All of which is swung out in abundance in The Girl from Ipanema: Brazil, Bossa Nova and the Beach (BBC4, 9pm), a documentary so inoffensive and middle-class that it couldn’t have been more suited to its subject if it had put on a straw hat, headed to Rio de Janeiro and started singing like Astrud Gilberto. Softly.
Which is precisely what presenter Katie Derham did (minus the singing). Why Derham? Because – despite hailing from Canterbury and being described by Craig Revel Horwood as “permanently looking as if she is at finishing school” when she was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing – Derham’s father was born in Rio and her childhood was soundtracked by bossa nova. Erm, that’s it in terms of the connection and, at first, Derham seemed an awkward fit with her prim presenting style – which mostly involved donning said straw hat, tilting her head and half-smiling like a GP politely enduring her patient’s woes as the godfathers of bossa nova relived the barefoot beach guitar-plucking that characterised the genre’s golden age.
Then it made sense. Bossa nova originated in the fashionable beachfront apartments of Copacabana in the late 1950s. It was apolitical and middle-class to its soft core, and was concerned from the outset with love not war, flowers not favelas. It was a product of its time, in this case the buoyant Brazil that flourished under president Juscelino Kubitschek. And it was extraordinarily shortlived. In 1964, the same year the Beatles won best new artist at the Grammys and The Girl from Ipanema won record of the year, a US-backed military coup ended Brazil’s experiment with democracy. In Brazil, bossa nova became an irrelevance. In the US, it was relegated to the elevator.
I love a bit of bossa as much as the next person, but by the end of the documentary, it had all become a bit too sophisticated and noodly. The best bits were the anecdotes, which bossa nova aficionados will know but are cool enough to bear an earnest BBC4 music doc retelling. Such as the fact that the original Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes bear almost no resemblance to the English version by New Yorker Norman Gimbel that took bossa nova to the masses. The first line actually translates as: “Look at this beautiful thing full of grace.” See what I mean? No earworm. Or that the only reason Astrud Gilberto ended up singing on the mastered single that would go on to become the second most-recorded pop song in history was because none of the other Brazilian musicians spoke English.
Roberto Menescal, a founding father who seemed more fisherman than composer, summed up the spirit of bossa best. When he and his fellow Brazilian musicians were invited to New York to perform at Carnegie Hall in 1962, the concert that would introduce bossa nova to the world, Menescal declined. “I said I can’t go because I have a fishing trip to Cabo Frio,” he told Derham as she tilted her head and smiled sympathetically, poised to write him a doctor’s note. Thankfully, after some persuading by his pal Antônio Carlos Jobim, who went on to compose The Girl from Ipanema, he changed his mind.
***
From Copacabana to Cannes, Made in Chelsea: South of France (E4, 9pm) was more bronzing on the beach but with much less sophistication. And no good tunes. A summer special following spin-offs in New York and LA, this was basically south west London on yachts. The customary bitching, cheating, pardying, and the requisite number of champagne closeups ensued and, as usual, nothing actually happened. It’s actually a skill to be this relentlessly awful. Literally nothing funny or even memorably stupid was said or done. There was more talk about the dangers of flirting than actual flirting. You will find more action in an episode of Dawson’s Creek. But as Tiff, Toff, James, Ollie, Binky and co enthused about their search for “a bit of French sausage” in Antibes, an uncomfortable truth was rammed home. For this set and many like them – some of whom are running our country – it’s as if Brexit never happened.
