As I suspected, what should have been a celebration of Adam Ant couldn't resist upping the ghoulish ante. We KNOW he's got mental problems, so why not focus more on why he's famous in the first place, for the benefit of those unlucky enough to be under 30?
It featured Mr Morley and Adam's friends commenting on how sad it was that the media have concentrated more on his mental illness in a zoo-animal fashion, rather than on his work and place in cultural history.
This was a point made in a documentary that, er, concentrated more on his mental illness in a zoo-animal fashion, rather than on his work and place in cultural history.
How TV Works, Part 374.
Having said that, the non lets-look-at-the-loony parts and all the archive footage was marvellous. People need to be reminded of a time when anyone vaguely unusual and interesting like the exotic and beautiful Mr Ant was even ALLOWED to get anywhere near the charts, let alone constantly top them.
It was gratifying to see any vaguely serious documentary about him at all, away from the I Love Nostalgia clipfests. Perhaps this heralds a new trend of covering classics of British music properly? I'd love to see a decent doc on Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice, but I'd rather it didn't take Edwyn throwing a piece of a car through a Kentish Town pub window for it to get made.
For some reason, the narrator was Justine Frischmann from Elastica. Whose speaking voice has curiously become a lot posher since the Britpop days. When I say "become", I mean "reverted", of course. Actually, so has Damon Albarn's. In the recent film "Live Forever", archive interviews of him sounding like Ray Winstone are juxtaposed with recent footage of him sounding like Brian Sewell. I think this is in fact a good thing: once you hit 30, you stop trying to bevel down the edges of yourself in order to reach some mythical common ground of fitting in, and polish up who you really are, so if the world loves you, or doesn't love you, either way, it's for the right reasons.
Unless you are Neil Morrissey and Leslie Ash, who are unctuous ingratiation personified. The Adam Ant doc's ad breaks featured Neil Morrissey and Leslie Ash going to Homebase. At the end of which, I doubt there was a viewer who DIDN'T feel like going out and throwing something through a window, whatever their previous mental history.
By way of a curious parallel, the edition of Big Brother that followed began with the housemates dressed in operatic costumes, just like something out of an Adam Ant video. And then ended disturbingly with one of the housemates displaying violent psychotic tendencies for our viewing pleasure.
I was reminded of various parties of my teenage years, where, after sufficient alcohol was consumed by all, some boys thought it was extremely funny to grab girls and drag them along floors and down stairs and so forth. I usually left the party fairly quickly at that point. Ray from BB has done this on more than one occasion now. He's not a teenage boy. He's a fully grown man. The producers gave him a thorough talking-to afterwards, and all is apparently now forgiven. But I feel very uneasy about the man and would not want him to marry into my family.
I think, in my case, I've always been frightened of drunken men physically manhandling others out of "fun". In what way is it even vaguely amusing?
