Howard Goodall's 20th Century Greats
In what is evidently going to be a cracking good four-part series on 20th century composers who will be remembered in the future much as Beethoven, Mozart and Bach are today, Howard Goodall kicked off more or less inevitably, though justifiably, at the weekend with a programme on The Beatles ? and more specifically on the talents of Paul McCartney (though Lennon and Harrison also got a look-in).
While taking the odd swipe at the European avant-garde of the 50s and 60s (and only near the end acknowledging their influence in the introduction of tape-loops and other experimental studio techniques into the Fab Four?s work), one point of the programme was to praise the Beatles for returning melody, harmony and other virtues of the western musical tradition to vogue after the avant-garde had cast them aside.
The show was a feast of innovative analogies (walking from one coloured room to another to demonstrate the relationship between keys, for example); clear and accessible illustrated explanations of terms such as modulation; and sung demonstrations by Howard plus portable, or not-so-portable, keyboard in a wide variety of locations, from the banks of the Mersey to a churchyard (for Eleanor Rigby, of course) and an abandoned airfield that looked suspiciously as if it was used in Magical Mystery Tour.
We might criticise Goodall for giving The Four all the credit for bringing tunes and popularity back to serious music (though as Mike Batt said, there is actually no such things as 'popular music' and 'serious music', there's just 'popular' and 'unpopular'). For example, one could argue - as does the relatively recent, and excellent in a quite different way, BBC Four doc, Here's a piano I prepared earlier - that in fact the avant-garde was at least as much responsible for the development of minimalism as the Beatles, via such things as Gavin Bryars' deeply emotional Jesus's Blood...; the increasingly accessible works of Philip Glass et al; and thereby the modern popularity of ClassicFM.
On the production side, Goodall actually linked into each commercial break, telling you what would be covered in the next part: a technique guaranteed to have you there after the ads, if it's any good (why don't other people do this?). Apart from clever use of colour and well-selected locations, split-screen techniques abounded, with multiple panels each carrying a different image and occasionally most of the screen plain black. All very satisfying, innovative, well-paced, instructive and fun.
Why, then, did the team at Tiger Aspect Productions feel it necessary to zoom and crop primary monochrome archive footage to 16:9, with the usual results? The rest of the programme featured such innovative use of the screen space - including apparently flying very close to the wind when it comes to safe areas, and floating small frames alone on a black screen - that it would have been entirely in keeping with the style of the production to take 4:3 footage and butt it up to left or right of the screen for example. But, apparently, while you can use all kinds of interesting image shapes and sizes in a modern factual production, leaving alone the aspect ratio of archive footage is not one of them.
Don't let this put you off, though. It's obviously going to be a great series, and I'll be popping each of the four programmes (next is Cole Porter, and check the link at the top for details of all four shows) on to the hard drive as soon as they go out.
