1970s

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978. It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered. It is an authentically confusing programme, where any firm moral position doesn’t stay firm for long As Clinton put it, in 1945 a question emerged whose implications would dominate post-war US foreign policy: ‘Why didn’t we do more to try to prevent the transport of the Jews?’ The immediate response was the heartfelt yet potentially

Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it has become almost the antithesis of what it was back at the end of the 1970s, when the term was invented. Then it referred to bands who released stuff on small independent labels because the big labels wouldn’t take them on. Shouty, angsty and angular, or just weird and beloved by the befringed dolorous yoof, in their anoraks or donkey jackets, the whole thing had a pleasing DIY feel to it, even if it sometimes grated. These days ‘indie’ just tends to mean anodyne power pop played by whining blokes

When the apocalypse comes, I want it to be scripted by a 1970s screenwriter. That’s my conclusion after watching the first few episodes of Terry Nation’s landmark 1975 ‘cosy catastrophe’ series Survivors on BritBox. Everything was so much more innocent and charming back then, including the end of the world. Survivors establishes its MacGuffin in the opening credits: a montage which begins with a masked, enigmatic oriental man in a laboratory where he accidentally smashes a vial; we then see clips of him in a suit travelling through various airports, with passport stamps (New York, London, etc) taunting us from the past with just how easy it was back then

If you’re after an exciting, twisty programme about police corruption that doesn’t also feel a bit like sitting an exam in Line of Duty studies, then Bent Coppers: Crossing the Line of Duty could well hit the spot. As both the timing and subtitle not so much suggest as bellow, this three-part documentary series is an obvious attempt to cash in on its fictional counterpart. Happily, though, it’s a successful one. In Wednesday’s second episode the focus was on 1970s Soho, where the most reliable way to make a fortune was by opening what the narrator Philip Glenister called, in suitably 1970s argot, ‘dirty bookshops’. Of course, there were certain

Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling about the implausible and anachronistic diversity casting. Mangrove was the West Indian-owned restaurant in Notting Hill which, in 1970, became the subject for a landmark Old Bailey trial involving nine of its habitués on trumped-up charges of riot and affray. Though it gets much better once we’re actually in court, the first hour’s build-up is awfully slow. I fear writer/director Steve McQueen is to blame. He has an artist’s eye for the visual side of things: the look and feel of late-1960s west London — just as the Westway overpass

While locked-down galleries compete to keep their artists in the public eye — or ear — by uploading interview podcasts, a treasure trove of earlier recordings is being overlooked. Artists’ Lives, part of the British Library’s oral history archive, is a collection of interviews with 370 artists, 200 of which are available on the British Library Sounds website. As an account of British art of the past century they are more comprehensive than Vasari’s Lives and more reliable, coming as they do from the horse’s mouth. They are also exhaustive. But for those who haven’t got all day to follow the fascinating career of Guyanese-born Frank Bowling RA through 17

Somewhere in the bowels of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is a portrait from a lost world. Its subject is a beautiful young woman: Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran. The condition of the work, however, a luminous print by Andy Warhol from 1977, is so bad that it could be a metaphor for Iran itself. Fundamentalist vandals have slashed at it with knives. The Empress — forced into exile when the Iranian Revolution overthrew her husband, the Shah, two years after the portrait was completed — discovered this upsetting news while watching French TV in her Paris apartment. ‘Seeing that, I said, “They are stupid”,’ she

If Julian, Dick, George and Anne had become terrorists they’d have called themselves The Angry Brigade. It’s such a Wendy house name. The quartet of violent outcasts met in a Camden squat in the late Sixties and moved to Stoke Newington where they rented a house to deflect unwanted attention. They began planting bombs around London in the hope of jerking the proles from their consumerist trance and sparking a communist war. They preferred catchy locations for their fireworks: the Albert Hall, a BBC film unit, an MP’s garden. And it took the cops ages to track them down and sling them in jail. James Graham’s new play uses a

In the giftshop at the new Elvis exhibition at the Dome, you can buy your own version of his flared white jumpsuits. I can’t think of anyone who could wear one and not look ridiculous — particularly if they had a bit of a weight problem. But Elvis, who would have turned 80 this year, managed to pull it off. This selection of the best Elvisiana from Graceland is full of the sort of kitschy excess that would sit so awkwardly on anyone else: his outsized solitaire diamond ring, the gold phone by his bedside table, the Harley-Davidson golf carts he used to rocket through Graceland’s grounds. It’s easy to

Take tissues to The Best of Me, I’d read, as it’s such a weepie, so I took tissues, being a weeper at weepies — I still dab my eyes whenever I even think about War Horse — but it was rubbish advice. You don’t need tissues for this film. Instead, you need to line up several triple espressos, as many cans of Red Bull as you can reasonably manage, two matchsticks (one for each eye, obviously), replacement matchsticks for when the weight of your eyelids proves too much and they snap, plus a small hammer to knock yourself in the side of your head when you find yourself bored out