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Radio One More Time: Twenty-Five Years Of Rock
As we've seen, when Radio One's documentaries were good, they were very, very good.
When they were poor, though... well, they stank so bad you could hear your speakers hum. The bad ones were usually due to the
application of an well-meaning, but too expansive, idea, or one that the production team were too close to too notice they were producing something overlong, obsessive and trussed in an anorak.
We know, we know, the irony of writing that last sentence in the middle of a forty-part series on fragments of Radio One.
The Story of Music Radio was one of these, a lovingly-crafted hymn to the joys of Luxembourg, pirate radio and the first days of Radio One, crafted, mostly, by people who were there. What could have been a interesting hour-long romp stretched out for weeks and weeks, and it was like being played old tapes by your aunt, while your uncle explained them all to you. For weeks.
But Music Radio was whistle-stop compared to Twenty-Five Years Of Rock, a "celebration" of the first quarter century of the music of Elvis. Like a school tour of a poorly curated museum, an uninterested audience was marched past dusty artefact after dusty artefact, as a pantheon was knocked-together before your ears. Any sense of joy, excitement, of the original spontaneity which drove rock to rule the music world was carefully removed; a music which jumped your bones and stuck its hand up your skirts was made to wear its best suit and sit quietly in the parlour as its parents enthused over what a good boy it was.
I suspect there may only have been twenty-five episodes, but it seemed to run non-stop from 1977 until 1981 and - just when it was all over - it appeared in a revised format. Thirty Years Of Rock. There was much to be admired about rock's pioneers - the Richards, the Hollys, even the Presleys - but it couldn't be taught like multiplication tables or the development of steam power. They'd have been better off just playing the records.
[Part of Radio One More Time]
3 comments:
Is this series connected to 'The Story of Rock'? I remember this being a seemingly-endless documentary series which was broadcast in the mid-nineties. It went out at 9pm on Tuesdays, just before Mark Radcliffe, and was presented by Alan Freeman (I can still hear him now, announcing it as "The Story... of Rock.").
The interesting-ish thing was that this series, which came in about 80 parts, appeared to have started its run during pre-Bannister Radio 1, where it probably fitted right in. However, probably due to a reluctance to cut it short, it carried on into new Radio 1. The later episodes appeared strangely out of place in the schedule, occupying the same 9pm slot as the likes of Lee and Herring and Chris Morris.
Different series. You're right - I think the Freeman epic was probably commissioned by Johnny Beerling and bore fruit at the height of the Bannistering. It gets a re-run on 6 Music overnights sometimes.
My memory of 30 Years Of Rock is different - I don't think there were any talking heads between the records. I don't think anyone explained anything. It was actuality and (admittedly perhaps some revoiced) news headlines.
If anything it was probably a bit exclusive if you weren't there first time around....
The 1977 show would have been all disco, the Pistols, jubilee etc. 1969 was hippies and moon landings set to Space Oddity (natch) and Country Joe.
Not all Elvis and Buddy anyway.
Sad to tell I taped almost all of "25 Years of Rock" when it was originally broadcast in 1980 (it covered the years 1955 to 1979). The music was often an incidental to the news stories, reportage and audio of the events that happened in each year, so it more accurately should have been called "25 Years of News (with songs too)". Perhaps even sadder to tell, I really enjoyed relistening to it many years later when 1979 itself was history - very evocative.
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