We’re wrong to mock Do They Know It’s Christmas?

‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? He was, of course, quoting John Lennon from the 1969 Beatles rooftop concert: an appropriate reference in the circumstances – because this documentary was a kind of Get Back for the Smash Hits generation. Like a far shorter version of Peter Jackson’s film of the Beatles at work, it mixed footage we’d seen before with stuff locked away in the vaults for decades. It was also equally unafraid of longueurs, equally determined to accentuate the positive and equally likely to warm the flintiest of hearts.

The setting was a still-shabby Notting Hill on Sunday 25 November 1984, where Geldof and Midge Ure began the day wondering if any of the pop stars they’d invited to make a charity record for Ethiopia would show up.