The BBC just can't stop showing that flipping Lennon Naked drama. No sooner have we emerged from the Fatherhood Season, where it first appeared, than we're into a John Lennon Night on BBC Four, featuring Lennon Naked again under a new temporary flag of convenience.
Joe, Sam and Bruce may be three callow teenagers from southern Utah but they’re still smart enough to realise that the only world they have ever known is wrong, deeply wrong. So wrong, in fact, that they make the hardest decision of their lives by leaving their family, friends and community behind forever, as this is the only way to escape the madness.
Films about rock stars usually fail, because it's impossible to recreate whatever larger-than-life qualities made them unique and famous in the first place. You frequently end up with a slightly embarrassing party-piece impersonation that captures some of the mannerisms but misses the essence of the character.
Almost like an inverted echo of Stevie Wonder over in Detroit, Little Stevie Winwood was a Brummie teen prodigy who scored an early dose of stardom with the Spencer Davis Group at age 15. Raved over for his amazing soulful vocals and effortless instrumental skills, he went on to form Traffic before joining “supergroup” Blind Faith with Eric Clapton.
Remarkably, the most provocative moments in Sir David Frost's survey of TV satire were supplied by his own early-Sixties show, That Was The Week That Was, when he was still an oily young upstart on the make. The BBC's Director General himself had declared that the aim of the show was to "prick the pomposity of public figures", but he must have felt the shockwaves rattling the door of his office.
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything.
Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it. Those fortunate enough to move into these beautiful new homes are doing so of their own accord, of course, but many of those held in their previous incarnations would have preferred to be anywhere else at all.