The Sound of Music Children: After They Were Famous ITV
Little Women: A Day in the Life of a Tweenager BBC2
Walk On By BBC2
Last week, Sir Norman Wisdom was in Albania and Lee Evans was on BBC1. After viewing the latter's desperate new sitcom, So What Now? I can't help feeling this was the wrong way around. In another intriguing juxtaposition last week, it was also revealed that the link between Rodgers and Hammerstein and Muddy Waters is not as tenuous as one might imagine. But let us start at the very beginning which is, of course, a very good place to start. An engrossing After They Were Famous rounded up the child stars of The Sound of Music and persuaded them to revisit Salzburg for the first time in 35 years, though sadly not to don dirndl and lederhosen. They turned out to be an immensely easy-going, sane and likeable bunch of forty- and fiftysomethings, still friends (indeed, seemingly closer than many siblings) and remarkably unscrewed-up by having starred in the Most Successful Movie of All Time. Though not in Austria, where it closed after three days amid cries of 'Nazis? Us? Auf Wiedersehen my arse!'
Most of the seven grew up with an ambivalent relationship to the movie, particularly during their teens, when having 'Do-Re-Mi' on your CV must have been only slightly less cool than boasting about your six-month tour in 'Nam. Now, though, even the quiet one, Duane Chase, a geologist who played Kurt, has come to terms with the extraordinary influence the film has exerted, not only on the billion people who are alleged to have seen it (where do they get these figures?), but on those who lived it too. These days, Duane's favourite hobby is climbing. Ev'ry mountain, presumably.
At such impressionable ages, a nine-month shoot (it took one whole month to film the 'Do-Re-Mi' scenes alone) was bound to leave it's mark. Fourteen-year-old Nicholas Hammond (Friedrich and, much later, Spiderman in a costume arguably more embarrassing than lederhosen) grew up to discover that when you belong to the world's happiest filmic family, expectations of 'a perfect wedding, a perfect relationship and a perfect family don't serve you well', though he is the only junior Von Trapp to have made a successful career in the business.
Meanwhile, Charmian Carr (Liesl) was a fraud - the girl who sang 'I am sixteen, going on seventeen' was 21 and thus closer to Julie Andrews's age than those of her faux-siblings, but even she grew up expecting life to be a bit more Rodgers and Hammerstein than it turned out to be. Now a 56-year-old super-glamorous divorced interior decorator (she worked on Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch. No prizes for guessing his favourite movie), Charmian admits that 'there isn't that ideal family. It doesn't exist'. Aside from the birth of her daughters and her grandchild, she still counts the ovation she received from the crew after dancing through the filming of 'Sixteen Going On Seventeen' with a sprained ankle as 'one of the most thrilling moments of my life'.
The Sound of Music was the second film I ever saw (after The Jungle Book) and, for a sibling-free only child with a rich interior fantasy life, it was truly the cinematic incarnation of heaven. What was most fascinating and touching about this programme, then, was discovering that the cast had been seduced almost as much as the audience. At the end of the show, charming Nicholas said that the experience of making the documentary had forced him to 'look at my childhood from the perspective of a 50-year-old. And in a funny sort of way I feel like I'm saying goodbye to this film now'. By the time Nicholas, Charmian, Angela, Heather, Debbie, Duane and Kym sang 'So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye...' there wasn't a dry eye in my house, so perhaps we all were.
I don't know what, if anything, little girls make of The Sound of Music these days. Probably they are too busy worshipping Kym from Hear'say to be greatly inspired by Kym Karath's Gretl. BBC2's Little Women: A Day In The Life of a Tweenager ('media-savvy pre-teens' explained the editor of Cosmo Girl) looked set to confirm one's suspicion that Britain is breeding playgrounds full of mini-Britneys - terrifyingly knowing, belly-button-baring poptots who can spot the difference between Clinique and Laboratoire Garnier, a pair of Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks, and invariably favour Madonna's Music over The Sound of Music 's soppy singing nun.
But, somewhat surprisingly, the programme revealed that underneath, say, 11-year-old Lauren's preternaturally lip-glossed veneer of sophistication ('that's the trouble with these tops, they fall down' she observed of her boob tube. Ah, but not for long, my love) she was, really, just an 11-year-old, albeit an 11-year-old whose language was 16 going on 17. Lauren even admitted that she wanted a horse - even more than she wanted a leopard-print basque, Leonardo DiCaprio and a Brit award - which was exactly what I wanted when I was 11. 'What kind of look are you going for?' asked the director, as 10-year-old Alex riffled through her smalls drawer. 'Biker babe,' Alex said without missing a beat, bless her little leathers. Meanwhile, Leigh, eight, and Georgia, seven, were in the back of a taxi with Leigh's dad. 'We're going to Harrods, shopping for clothes,' explained Leigh before immediately turning to her best friend and asking the very important consumerist question 'do you prefer big cats or little cats?' 'Kittens,' replied the winsome little poppet. Inside the store, as he flashed his plastic, Leigh's dad was asked why he spent so much on clothes for an eight-year-old who might only wear them half a dozen times. 'Because I can,' he replied with a wry smile. Roll on the recession, eh!
Funny thing, this, but though we might not shop very much, we get far better pop music during recessions. During the last one, for example, Stock, Aitken and Waterman's 1980s' chart domination suddenly gave way to the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, who, in turn, begat the likes of Pulp, Blur and Oasis. Who may now be waiting in the wings ready to reach for the stars and oust Steps in the process? Which brings me neatly back to the beginning (which is a very good place to end) and the very best documentary series currently on TV, BBC2's Walk On By.
Week three and this well-nigh definitive history of popular song has only just arrived at early Elvis, but what a blinding journey it's been so far. Littered with riveting archive footage of ancient Appalachian hillybilly banjo ensembles and honky-tonk bluesmen waking up one mornin' and findin' a hole in their bucket, relevant anecdotage is also provided by a staggering array of ageing musical legends (only Elvis was missing and he had an excuse).
There was Loretta Lynn, Van Morrison, Ray Charles, BB King and even Keith Richards (helpfully captioned 'musician') on hand to explain how 'blues is a beautifully flexible music for such a limited form' and then demonstrate why. Here, too, was Jerry Wexler (captioned 'senior producer, Atlantic Records' which doesn't even come close to describing his place in the grand scheme of popular music) recalling the 1930s, when the description '"Race music" was an honourable designation', and a couple of black guys would describe a third party as 'a Race man to the bricks, a proud promulgator of negritude'. And if that isn't the most gloriously mellifluous musical sentence uttered during the whole of terrestrial TV's output last week, then I'm Muddy Waters. 'Somehow,' Wexler continued, 'down the line, "Race" seemed to imply separation and inferiority and so we changed it to rhythm and blues...' And when he says 'we', he means 'I'.
From Rodgers and Hammerstein to Muddy Waters, then? Well, there's not much separating The Sound of Music 's yodelling from that of country star Jimmy Rogers, who died in 1933 and whose music was the first to be described as 'white blues' - the pioneer crossover hitmaker (and I'm afraid I just threw Muddy in there to blues the waters a bit). Walk On By is absolutely unmissable television - possibly even for Britney fans, but especially for a TV critic whose brilliant lyricist of a father has written words that have been sung by Ray Charles and Elvis and which never fail to send shivers down my spine each time I hear them. Yes, just like the Von Trapps, we Fletts are practically black - and, obviously, very, very proud.
