(Making) The Monkees

[weekender]

There's a programme on Channel 4 tonight at 10pm about The Monkees:

Documentary charting the rise and fall of the first manufactured pop group. In 1967, four unknown actors in a kids' TV show became the biggest pop band in the world. In America, they outsold Elvis and the Beatles combined. But behind the sugary smiles and bubblegum pop songs lay a cut-throat business enterprise fuelled by money, ego and the ambition of some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

I know they're a manufactured band, but they still had some cracking songs and I find their story quite interesting.  Hopefully this documentary will be pretty good.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Were the really the very first manufactured pop group or just the first ones to be successful?

[Sadness]

Really enjoyed this documentary I must say. Peter Tork is such a cool bloke and what really struck me, even though I've been a fan 30 years or so, is how tiny a shelf life they actually had but making the original TV show just kept them such a high profile entity.

A year at the very very top.....?

Incredible phenomenon they were, a one off really.

[trotsky assortment]

I might pick up the DVDs if they are available at a decent price sometime.  I'd like to see the Mike Nesmith/Frank Zappa interview segment in full sized, decent quality.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

The programme doesn't really stand up today, although the later more far-out episodes are quite good fun, and genuinely odd for a prime-time TV show. But the musical interludes are fantastic, as you might expect.

But a decent "Best Of" (and there are millions to choose from) and the "Headquarters", "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd." and "Head" albums are a must for any collection.

Incidentally, I thought this programme was a disappointment from a fan's point of view. Didn't include anything which hasn't been said before, and the music - which is really the only thing worth bothering with today - was given remarkably short shrift.

It also annoyed me in the way in which it erroneously inferred that the music took a dip in quality as soon as the band seized control, which is in fact the exact opposite of the truth. There's great stuff to be found even on their final few records, long after the public deserted them.

[Sadness]

We're never ever ever EVER going to get what 'we' really want as real fans of the Monkees/Beatles/Kinks etc, etc out of any pretty much prime-time documentary like this.

So approaching it with this premise means you could actually really enjoy this programme. Did you really think that they were going to discuss in length the fact that "Tapioca Tundra" is light fucking years ahead of ANY Neil Diamond song and that Mike Nesmith was talented enough to take charge of the whole outfit??

That's for DVD's aimed specifically at us one day (hopefully), not Sunday night on Ch4.

So on that basis I'd recommend it as an entertaining hour of TV with new interviews and some people being interviewed that we see or hear far too little of (i.e Raffelson).