Worried About The Boy

 

With all the fuss over Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee last week it was a divinely opportune time to release a fictional drama series about The Sex Pistols. Look at what they got up to last time something like this happened after all.

So, Pistol. For the record I don't actually think it's much good. I watched three or four episodes on the Disney Channel ,which I stream and I'm not particularly desperate to watch the rest though given my abiding interest in this stuff I surely will at some point.

It's a cartoon essentially. A watchable cartoon if you're interested in the source material but a cartoon all the same. Characters spout Punk Manifestos fully formed. London looks like the bombsite of popular legend. The Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren characters sound just like them and look not entirely like them without for a moment convincing you that they are them. 

Most of all the six part series never entirely convinces you of its reason for being and what exactly it has to say, which given how important this episode in musical history, and let's face it, history as a whole is, that doesn't say much for it. It could and should have been much much better. 

Not many of these music biopic things are really much good though are they? In the sense that they offer you more than the opportunity to relive memories of your youth, if you were alive when the events took place, or genuinely teach you something if you weren't.

They're very rarely good in the conventional sense in that they're cast by actors who look, sound and behave like the people they're playing, have live musical performances that convince and dialogue that you believe may actually have taken place while recreating the look of the period being reanacted flawlessly. Perhaps that's a lot to ask but it certainly rarely actually happens.

That is rarely the actual intention of the Films or made for TV biopics like this. It's generally a question of printing the legend and fuck the actual quality.The films about Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash and Ray Charles are probably as good as these things get in respect of actual veritude. Oliver Stone's The Doors is probably up there too though it gets docked a couple of marks for swallowing Danny Sugerman's version of the Morrison myth pretty much whole.

Still, I'd better get round to what this all made me think of why I started writing this post in the first place and the film that made me do it. An excellent, but probably largely forgotten TV film, made and broadcast by the BBC in 2010 about The Blitz Club, The New Romantic Scene and first and foremost about the emergence and arrival of Boy George and Cultural Club.

Because it's just outstanding, in every respect. The cast and their actual resemblance to the people they're playing. The dialogue, that never crossed the borderling between showing and telling, narrative and cliche. The focus on actual character devlopment rather than ticking off a checklist beofre the first Top of the Pops performance.

Worried About The Boy gets everything completely right. It's also highly entertaining. And most of all it makes you empathise with George and realise fully how brave and uncompromising he always was, while also realising what a royal pain he also was at one and the same time.

That's the kind of thing I prefer to watch to be honest. Watching Pistol I just felt that I was being told another lie which was ironic really given how keen The Pistols always seemed about avoiding doing that and point out the fault in others. This was one that I really believed. And recommend. Highly. It's freely available on YouTube