there's some discussion of this already here
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/synth-britannia

Caberet Voltaire wandering around derelict art schools making Sheffield look like the Stalker wastelands, Daniel Miller showing off his synth collection (Kraftwerk's vocoder!), John Foxx, the guy from OMD reminding you how good the early stuff was, the bitterness still of the Human League/BEF split.

And JG Ballard every 5 seconds wandering around as everyone agreed that he just about got seventies Britain down...

Later section with Depeche Mode, Erasure, Soft Cell, Midge Ure a bit more well-worn but still good to see.

God bless you BBC4!

Am I mistaken or was that Nick Drake’s sister, Gabrielle, in Gary Numan’s Cars video. She was in a science fiction show UFO at the time so quite an obvious person to cast. Still, the irony.
Great programme. I‘d forgotten what great pop groups OMD, Human League and Depeche Mode were. I’d also forgotten how popular the geeky pursuits of science fiction and mucking about with electronics were at the time amongst a significant proportion of young males. Love the story of Barney off New Order spending two months with a soldering iron making a synth out an electronics magazine kit.
And as Janice pointed out it was striking how bitter they all still are about how they were treated by the press. I think on the whole music journalists aren’t nearly as blinkered and conservative now as they were then.
A good companion piece to this would be a documentary about New Romantics. Or maybe BBC 4 have already done one.

Good to see Chris and Cosey, would've liked to have heard more from them. Shame there was no mention of Dolby, nor the (much-maligned) Flock of Seagulls..it's a funny category. Numan used real drums and bass, OMD used a bass..and TG used bass and guitars (badly). Only Depeche Mode and the early Human League seemed to rely solely on keyboards.

was David Bowie. It's hard to imagine Gary Numan sounding the way he did without Low and Heroes having appeared a few short years previously. The grand synth sweeps of Our Friends Electric and Cars owe an obvious debt; his singing, though rather ugly in many ways, sounds influenced by the Thin White Duke, and even his moves on stage looked borrowed. As for Bowie Himself, Sound And Vision had been a sizeable hit in 1977, well before any of the acts mentioned on the programme (which I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way, to answer Janice's question) had had a sniff of a hit. Although it had a fairly conventional rhythm section, its heavily processed drum sounds and key synth motif - and its lyric - were pointing the way towards the icy alienation of your slightly later synthpop "pioneers."

by how many of the pioneers actually made their own synths. Wonder how many X factor stars could use a soldering iron...?

and hopefully there is a part 2?

I missed it but I will look out for inevitable repeat. Very excited about seeing Depeche Mode in December at the O2.

...and so I caught it at three in the morning on BBC4. Two things struck me:

* more than one musician said that they'd made their first synthesizer from a kit, using a soldering iron and following instructions in am electronics magazine. Does anybody do anything so laborious nowadays?
* all these acts were saying how jealous they were of the success of Gary Numan and how much they admired him. I was editor of Smash Hits at the time and I don't recall *anyone* apart from his fans having a good word to say about Numan. A lot of the bitchiness they cite came from fellow musicians.