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I suspect most Spectator readers will have failed to catch this show but, like How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? which preceded it, this is a talent contest in which the winner gets to star in a West End musical. Last year the delightful Connie Fisher won the lead in The Sound of Music, and this time a dozen likely lads have been competing to perform the title role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
As you would imagine with a show hosted by Graham Norton, the whole thing is as camp as it comes. Even Denise Van Outen is beginning to look like a man in drag. But the strange and touching miracle of the show is that Andrew Lloyd Webber — who sits on an absurd throne and has a Roman emperor’s power to decide which of the lowest scoring contestants survives to sing another day — has suddenly become a cult hero. For years people flocked to his shows but seemed to dislike the man, but here his ability to combine self-mockery with a manifest passion for musical theatre proves hugely endearing. ‘The Lord’, as Norton often calls him, has somehow, finally, become a superstar in his own right. But I do hope Keith — a grinning, toothy, hugely self-satisfied youth who makes Tommy Steele look like Frank Sinatra, doesn’t win. Indeed I urge all ‘Olden but golden’ readers to vote for Lee. Together we can swing it.
All of this was excitement enough, but then my son Edward and I chanced upon a third programme, on BBC2, called Seven Ages of Rock, a documentary series that treats pop music with the same seriousness that Kenneth Clark once brought to Civilisation. The splendid Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead has attacked the series because the makers have decided that rock music began in the late Sixties, and have entirely ignored the great rock’n’rollers of the Fifties and early Sixties.
‘The best era is the one that’s been left out,’ he wrote passionately in the Radio Times, ‘which is the first era right up to the Beatles. And to forget it is ridiculous. At a stroke the likes of Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran and a thousand others dismissed — brilliant, eh? That’s the era that made rock’n’roll.’
He’s right, of course. To ignore the early rockers is like doing a series on English literature and leaving out Chaucer. Nevertheless the two programmes I’ve caught, one featuring ‘art rock’ from the Velvet Underground to David Bowie, the other punk, with some wonderful footage of Johnny Rotten, shouting, snarling and sneering like the malign lovechild of Richard III and the Artful Dodger, were pure joy. The contributors’ comments are intelligent, the live footage thrilling and potently nostalgic. What a pleasure it was to see Peter Gabriel preposterously dressed as a flower again, and dear Syd Barrett looking so beautiful and young.
This Saturday the programme focuses on heavy metal, a rockumentary that I suspect might prove as hilarious as that vintage film spoof Spinal Tap. Mrs Spencer will be gratifyingly appalled by it all, and Ed and I will be glued to the set with the volume turned all the way up to 11.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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