Well, the parts with John really were the highlights of this episode, weren't they

It could have been so much better by concentrating on one aspect at a time; all the important stuff was missed out.  What about that critical period when ted began to divide into ton-up boy and proto-mod, the 'Absolute Beginners' phase?  Too subtle?  And for Elms to call mods basically chavs!  I knew from reading his book his mother should have kicked the whining little bastard's arse for him.  His sole credentials have always been that his elder brothers were faces.  Nice to see Jim Cox, however.

The programme caught fire for maybe 2 minutes when they managed, rather effectively I thought, to conceptualize the mod as Jean-Paul Belmondo+Miles' green button-down+Soho Italian waiter chic. Charlie Watts and John were on form I felt and clearly spoke with the authority of genuine knowledge. Not sure about the other rather corpulent chap, also captioned as an 'original mod', Wayne Kirwan was it? But the rest of the programme... How they draw any sort of parallels between the absurdly ambitious aspirations of the 'original mod(ernist)' and the brain-dead consumption patterns of contemporary British prole youth I have no idea. Elms is a jerky, stuttering, physically rather repulsive spouter of media cliches. It wasn't all about just dressing up and having a good time you tit - it was so much more than that. Oh and Robert - Sade ditched you once she'd made it and didn't need you any more. Get over it and stop playing her muzack on your bloody radio programme. But the producers of this series of programmes, theoretically rather promising I thought, ought to be prosecuted for further perpetuating the same old stories. No original research, no insight, no new conclusions, no critique. And don't get me started on Paolo Hewitt. Paolo - get over it - Paul ditched you once he had made it. JS was the face wasn't he?

I feel the same, John and Charlie were the only ones who caught my interest. 

It was a pity that Eric Clapton wasn't interviewed, especially as he did a bit on Cordings in an earlier episode.

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Been trying to watch this but the "watch again" feature isn't available in the USA.  Any suggestions?

Thing is that very few people are interested in this sort of thing in the way some of us are. To most that once were involved in youthculture it meant little more than being trendy and having a good time. Seizing the moment as it were, they wouldn't have a clue as to what we're on about on this forum and why should they ? I'm afraid it'll never go much further than scratching under the surface a bit, which is fine by me. The whole point is that you wouldn't want people to understand, would you ?

Last edited by Alex Roest (2008-11-05 08:00:24)

I suppose inevitably this programme would never be what people like me would require but it was ok I suppose, some great archive stuff I think.

Wasn't sure where they were going with it at first, with those lovely Liverpool ladies but is sort of settled into what I expected of it. But is shows the inevitable danger of having spokespeople holding forth on subjects for which everyone has a different story. The accepted canon now seems to be the Elms/Hewitt set up. I don't mind them particularly but as always its too much of a simplification. There can never be a totally satisfactory programme on this subject because no one could agree.

Of course there are superficial elements linking all these subcultural strands and they are all interesting in their own ways and you could have done a programme on each of them that might have got past the simplistic notions presented. But who would watch it?

And old Elmsy, gawd, he said something sensible at one point, along the lines of casual really being the endpoint of the particular post war thing and one of the reasons for the 'if it's the right label' attitude we have at present but then he goes and spoils it by calling mods the equivalent of chavs. Robert old man, there's a difference of a country mile between the modernist aspiration of self development, of discovering the world than chav insularity.   

We should badger the beeb (sounds like a new perversion) to try and get the unedited JS and Charlie Watts interviews and make our own programme. Who's with me?

Last edited by SubtleCool (2008-11-05 11:29:38)

We know all the names, we just need to get to them without them being edited first by the wrong people - JS & his team, Charlie W, Eric C, Georgie F...

And Charlie Davidson just as Charlie Davidson without somebody else's interfering edit would be absolutely fantastic, thinking beyond London...

Last edited by Russell_Street (2008-11-06 01:47:09)