WHAT THE PROGRAMMES ABOUT THE POP PAPERS SAY

Curiously, in the Guardian listings for the BBC FOUR programme about the history of the NME, it called it "Arts Reports" and suggested it was a celebration for the 3,000th edition of the world's biggest-selling rock weekly; on the screen, though, it seemed to be called Inky Fingers: The NME Story and didn't have anything to say about 3,000 issues or otherwise.

In form, this was more of a modern NME-type story, picking out all the good bits and working quickly though them, instead of the Uncut-style feature that was clearly begging to be let out. It's frustrating that when this programme first aired, last Monday as part of an unofficial Julie Burchill night, BBC FOUR gave precisely the same length of time to 50 years of the NME as it gave to the seven issues or whatever it was of the Modern Review; five decades of tales could have provided much more than a single sixty minute documentary, and what made it to the screen was clear enough that there was a lot of material which got sweated out to fit the tight slot - Danny Baker, for example, has many tales to tell but here had only a thirty second cameo.

The rush meant some moments in the paper's history got rushed over way too quickly, and frankly, if you only have an hour, I'd rather have heard much more about the HipHop wars than Nick Kent's drug use again; it's incredible that the programme managed to cover this era without using the phrase "hip-hop Hitlers and go-go Goebells"; there was a lot about the Morrissey/Flag affair controversy but not a word on the Fooled In The USA Springsteen business.

They did find time to visit the Sing Me To Sleep issue - Lucy O'Brien's teen suicide investigation cover story which, it seems, only Andrew Collins and I actually seemed to like. Or bought, come to that.

Oddly, missing totally was the Penis Landscape issue - which, if memory serves, was the actual week that led to mass sackings and the sudden elevation of a half-page interview with Motorcycle Boy into a front-page story; the documentary suggested that it was the placing of Neil Kinnock on the cover for the 1987 General Election that lead to the gods of IPC descending from Kings Reach Tower's highest eeries. Nowhere was there any mention of Stuart Cosgrove's plans to provide all readers with their own copy of the poster which triggered the Dead Kennedys obscenity trial at all; such an obvious and huge ommission you wonder if that there was some deal cut to keep it out of the official history?

And it would have been nice to get some Quantick-Maconie-Collins live show style anecdotage (in fact, any Qunatick at all, come to that); but the biggest thing that was missing from the show was the thing that turned the paper from its also-run status at the fag end of the 60s to the only show in town in 2005 - there was very, very little of the writing. It's hard to imagine that a programme about an author wouldn't use lots of lavish examples of the work to illustrate just why they deserved the honour of a slice of screen time and the sweat of a dozen of the media world's most lavishly-rewarded researchers. It would have been nice to celebrate the NME as much for its genuinely great writing as for the number of drugs its writers consumed producing them.

A fine beginner's guide, then, but really it was the sort of thing you'd expect on BBC TWO. It would have been nice if BBC FOUR had taken the chance to produce something for the advanced class.

music stuart cosgrove nme tv dead kennedys