We are all about the 1950s today, and music, and Wales, among other places, and tuberculosis. Watching Tom Jones’s 1950s: The Decade That Made Me (BBC2, Saturday), I’m a bit confused about what they – the 1950s – were like. A grey, boring, grown-up world, says Sir Tom, at least until rock’n’roll came along. Grey, boring and flat, agrees Francis Beckett. Wrong, says Joan Bakewell, not grey and gloomy and depressing at all. There was no sex; there was sex … You can understand my confusion.
Maybe it was about who you were, where in Britain you were, where in the 50s you were. Tom – who wasn’t grey back then, or boring, or grown up – was in Treforest, Pontypridd, which being in a valley in South Wales was obviously full of singing, though not necessarily the kind of singing Tom wanted to do. “I didn’t like singing in choirs because you couldn’t shine,” he says. Tom looked further west for inspiration, beyond Swansea, beyond Pembrokeshire, to … the US, which is where everything good came from. He discovered Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson, neither of whom were at all grey or boring.
Aged 12, Tom got TB, and had to spend a couple of years in bed. He didn’t mind; he liked the attention, and it meant he could watch the new television and listen to the radio. Not the BBC and Glenn Miller (“I think he should’ve lived and his music should’ve died,” says Clem Cattini of the Tornados), but Radio Luxembourg, which played music young people actually wanted to listen to.
Another kind of TB, the teddy boy, arrived, Tom caught that, too. Then – a-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom – rock’n’roll itself turned up, like a tornado, even in Pontypridd. Tom was off, singing in local pubs and clubs. Then he disappeared under a pile of enthusiastic girls, known around those parts as a slag heap. There was one special one, even if she was, and would be, very, very far from exclusive. Tom returns to the window under which he used to serenade her. Filming obviously took place before Linda’s death this month.
It is not earth-shattering cultural commentary or historically revelatory. But Tom is an amusing and entertaining guide – to his valley, to his decade, to his past. He gets more Welsh, that side of the Severn Bridge.
More gentle 50s musical nostalgia in Jim Carter: Lonnie Donegan and Me (ITV, Sunday). Jim – Carson! – believes that his skiffle hero has been forgotten, or is remembered only for My Old Man’s a Dustman: he wears a dustman’s hat, he wears cor blimey trousers, and he lives in a council flat … So he is setting out to show why Lonnie was once the most famous, most exciting, most influential man in Britain; and why, after seeing him as an 11-year-old (Jim, not Lonnie) at the Regal Theatre in Great Yarmouth, he became his hero.
A love letter from a fan then. And a lovely love letter; one of the nicest bits is where Jim’s missus (Imelda Staunton) remembers wondering whether it was possible for Lonnie’s No 1 fan also to be Mr Right, for her. Another doubter, later converted.
But Jim has also enlisted more expert help to explain Lonnie’s musical significance. Van Morrison, Roger Daltrey, Jack White, the remaining Beatles. Not a bad cast of TV pundits, certainly a cut above the usual comedians and journalists. (They’re probably fans of Downton Abbey – I’m pretty sure White is – as well as of Lonnie Donegan). Ringo also mentions his own two years holed up with tuberculosis, which is when he starting banging things, percussively. (TB – a good way into music, if it doesn’t kill you.) Plus he demonstrates the washboard, another highlight.
Charming. Next week, Mrs Patmore’s guide to ska.
Not a fashionable thing to admit to, and I know he is annoying and a bit of a twerp, but I also enjoyed Michael McIntyre’s Big Show (BBC1, Saturday). Sweet-natured Saturday-night family entertainment, it could almost be the 50s. Except MM’s stunts are really good fun. I like Celebrity Send to All, in which every contact in Ginger Spice’s phone is offered a massage, and the replies are then broadcast to millions (I’d like to see a post-watershed version of that one). And Unexpected Star, in which nice hairdresser and wannabe singer Natasha thinks she is helping her mum out at a charity theatre event, and suddenly she is on stage in front of 2,500 people. I would actually die. Natasha does the opposite, comes to life. And sings, beautifully. Of course she does, she’s from Pencoed, just down the road from Pontypridd.
