Entertainment For Lively Minds
The Rock n Roll Years
If we're in the business of reviving old telly these days, then I for one would like to see the return of The Rock and Roll Years. What a great, simple format: show some old news clips and overlay them with the songs of the time.
I think that programme was pretty much where I got my knowledge of 60's and 70's history from - I already knew the songs from Jimmy Saville (open brackets and his old record club close brackets).
Each programme was so cleverly put together. Every major news story seems to have a (more-or-less) contemporary song that fits it - sometimes in an eerie way, sometimes comically.
It would be good if they were shown again. I think they only went up to about 1980, so there also getting on for thirty more editions yet to be made.
Here's a thing: when they make the the Rock and Roll Years for 2008, what will they show?
- How about the inevitable footage of shop-fronts for Bank of Scotland being taken down. Music: That's Not My Name by the Ting Tings.
- Any more??
- More from Simon Moffatt.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Very glad and a bit smug...
...that I recorded them all - bar the 1989 one, which is annoying - when they were first on. Then, much later, I put them on DVD. The first series went from 1956 to 1963, the second 1964-1971, and the third from 1972-1980. The ones after that (1981-1989) weren't nearly as good - surprise, surprise - and they looked as if they'd been put together by a different team. In a perfect postmodernist world, the 1985 episode would have commented on its own first episode.
Yes
I think it was Rock'n'Roll Years, but it might have been Sounds of the Seventies, where I saw a great clip of Steve Howe, opining: "The audiences these days are very sophisticated. Even the chicks know some of the chord sequences."