TV & Radio

9pm, BBC Four

DEDICATED to the shadowy musicians who allow stars to shine, The Story Of The Sideman – and, thankfully, some sidewomen – is one of the most interesting music documentaries BBC Four has produced in a while. It’s no classic: it’s a little thrown together; there are omissions and evasions; and too much of its 90 minutes’ running time consists of people walking in slow-motion while wearing sunglasses. But it gathers together some fantastic voices and is filled with valuable nuggets, several of which could have been spun into fascinating documentaries on their own.

Our presenter and guide is the estimable Earl Slick, best known for playing guitar for David Bowie off and on across a 40-year period. (It isn’t his real name. But, over the decades, through sheer willpower, he has morphed his body to the point where he now looks exactly like a New York rock’n’roll guitarist called Earl Slick should look: all raggedy black hair and pipe-cleaner legs, like a dissipated Disney cartoon crow.)

Having been on hand for 1976’s Station To Station – the masterpiece produced during the occult LA period when Bowie survived on witchcraft, cocaine and milk – Slick undoubtedly has a zillion amazing Bowie stories, none of which he tells. And, of course, this isn’t the point. This film isn’t about the stars, but about working on their sidelines a few feet away, helping make sure they look good, while not stepping into the spotlight yourself. Then once the album is done and the tour is finished, waiting anxiously for the phone to ring again.

As Keith Richards puts it: “The hard thing for a sideman is that the better you are at your job, the less people notice you.” Richards and the other Rolling Stones are present because one of the film’s main subjects is Bernard Fowler, their backing singer since the late-1980s. Fowler is good value, a great singer, and a charismatic storyteller. But his presence highlights a certain coyness, because notably absent is Darryl Jones, the black bassist who has been playing in the Stones ever since Bill Wyman left in 1993, yet is still considered a sideman rather than a Stone. An integral element on stage and on record for almost 25 years, Jones personifies one of the questions the documentary purports to examine – when is a side musician a crucial part of the act? – but goes completely unmentioned. Stones politics, no doubt.

The director, Francis Whately, makes up for this, however, by heavily featuring the magnificent Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, aka Wendy & Lisa, the guitar-piano team who were vital to the sound (and look) of Prince’s breakthrough band, The Revolution. The pair, who made strong contributions to Prince’s music, speak frankly yet without bitterness about what Melvoin calls her “ambivalence about that role, about what I knew Lisa and I were giving him”.

Another featured figure who might be entitled to sour grapes over lack of wider recognition, but appears to have no complaints at all, is Steve Cropper, the great Stax guitarist. Cropper is a legend to many but the wider public have never heard his name even though they have definitely heard the songs he co-wrote, little trifles including Dock Of The Bay and In The Midnight Hour. Whately gets all his subjects to play some tunes: Wendy and Lisa do a lovely Purple Rain, but best of all is when Cropper and the 80-year old Eddie Floyd knock out their most famous composition, Knock On Wood. It’s worth the entry price alone.

Sunday

George Best: All By Himself

9pm, BBC Two

THE story of George Best – staggering talent derailed by the celebrity that came with it, and how it set loose the man’s demons and addictions – is one of the most well-worn in British sport, and director Daniel Gordon’s film doesn’t add much that’s new. However, it’s a solid portrait, with fine contributions from sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney, and insight from Best’s wives. Gordon pinpoints fabled Manchester United manager Matt Busby’s 1969 retirement as the beginning of the end, depriving the mercurial Best of a disciplined father figure, and his team of direction. Beginning to drift, with the tabloids at his heels, the nightlife and the booze began to dominate. It’s a shame there isn’t more footage of Best on the pitch, but what’s here is fantastic. Look out for a clip from 1981, very late in his playing career, during his long twilight in America, when he was with The San Jose Earthquakes. Out of shape, he nevertheless rouses his slumbering genius one last time, for an astonishing, snaking few moments.

Monday

The Betrayed Girls

8.30pm, BBC One

SHOWN in May on BBC One, Three Girls, director Philippa Lowthorpe’s tough but tender series based on the events around the Rochdale child grooming case, was easily one of the best of the recent run of fact-based dramas, and demonstrated the power and value these things can have when they’re so well done: meticulously researched, yet able to put viewers into places where we can see new nuances to stories we might have thought we already knew. Now, though, comes the full documentary treatment, in this equally valuable feature-length film, which considers not only how the girls were damaged by their abusers, but also how they were badly let down by the authorities – police and social services had known about the abusers for years. There is sometimes harrowing new testimony from victims whose stories have gone unheard until now, and fresh contributions from some of the key people who fought on their behalf, including the sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham, former Detective Constable Maggie Oliver, chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal and journalist Andrew Norfolk.

Tuesday

Life Behind Bars: Visiting Hour

9pm, Channel 4

FILMED at HMP Low Moss, one of Scotland’s largest maximum security prisons, this intimate documentary focuses on an experience that’s common to the 86,000 people currently behind bars in the UK, yet uniquely special, and sometimes uniquely painful, for each. No matter what crime they have committed, prisoners are permitted a visiting hour, 60 minutes in the company of friends and family, during which they try to stay connected with the life they once had. Director Susan McGregor’s clear-eyed but poignant film hovers over the shoulders of a few inmates as the clock ticks. Gary, still a teenager, is serving time for murder. His girlfriend, Charley, visits regularly, and is keen to begin planning their wedding – but he is more reluctant, partly because he doesn’t know when he might be released. Elsewhere, Mark meets the granddaughter he has never seen, while Mike is visited by his elderly father and attempts to come to terms with the fact that his dad might die before he gets out again.

Wednesday

Joanna Lumley’s India

9pm, STV

HAVING notched up jaunts through Greece and Japan, along the Nile, aboard the Trans-Siberian Express and beneath the Northern Lights, the irrepressible J-Lum returns for another of her infectiously enthusiastic travelogues. But this trip has a more personal vibe, as it takes her back to the country where she was born in 1946, during the last days of the Raj. In the first of three episodes, she begins at India’s southern tip, travelling north from Tamil Nadu. Along the way, she meets up with an old family friend for a hair-raising motorbike ride around the hairpin bends of the Valparai Plateau; goes on a passionate search for some wild elephants; gets transformed into a goddess at a Tollywood film studio; and considers the harsher realities of life for the transgender community on the streets of Calcutta. This leg of her journey ends in the foothills of the Himalayas, at Sikkim, the place where her grandfather was stationed and her mother grew up, where she is presented with some unexpected family history.

Thursday

Who Do You Think You Are?

9pm, BBC One

FROM his breakthrough Jewel In The Crown to the leonine Tywin Lannister in Game Of Thrones, Charles Dance – the subject of the first episode of this new series of the BBC’s celebrity genealogy show – has spent his career playing variously imposing members of the ruling classes. But, as the 70-year-old points out, his own roots couldn’t be further removed from the typecasting. “There’s nothing aristocratic about me at all.” Born in London’s East End, his mother started working as a beneath-the-stairs parlour maid at 13. As for his father, well, that becomes a major part of his search tonight. “He died when I was four,” Dance says. “I don’t have an image of him in my mind. I believe he was an engineer … I just know very, very little. Why? I don’t know …” Investigating, he discovers a story he never imagined, one that brings history closer than he ever suspected, and brings with it news of siblings he never knew he had. It’s a fascinating and moving episode, and Dance is great company.

Saturday

Mea Culpa

9pm, BBC Four

For anyone impatiently watching the skies for the next series of Spiral, there was good and bad news this week. The good news: the trailer has just been released in France. The bad news: it says it’s “Coming soon” over there, meaning it still won’t be coming to BBC Four for a wee while yet. But if you’re needing a fix of tough and moody French detectives, this 2012 movie – while, obviously, no substitute for Laure – might tide you over. Vincent Lindon stars as a grizzled ex-cop who had to quit the force in shabby disgrace. But when his son becomes the target of gangsters after witnessing a murder, he hooks up with his ex-partner Gilles Lellouche to try and protect the kid, as bad guys come at them. It’s fairly light on plot, but director Fred Cavayé (best known for the thriller Anything For Her, remade as the Russell Crowe movie The Next Three Days) keeps the shootouts and car chases moving along at such a pace it’s pretty painless, and Lindon and Lellouche are great together.

LAST WEEK…

Last week, I was lucky enough to get a loan of a projector, and, having finally worked out how to wire the damn doohickey through the amplifier, I thought it would be a good idea to watch the latest episode of Twin Peaks (Sky Atlantic) in a dark room, blown up around 5 feet by 3, with the soundtrack pumping in full stereophonic hi-fi wonder.

Holy sweet Jesus Christ on a bike going backwards down the hill.

Even if I’d watched it on the regular TV, I’m fairly certain I would have been left affected by what the broadcast historians of tomorrow will, in whispered tones, refer to as Episode 8. As it was, going through the darkening pandimensional atomsmasher in the full Technirama wraparound, I’m left with new appreciation for the fabled 1968 audience member who, having dropped acid during Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, started screaming, “I see God’s face!” There came a point – halfway through the endless moment when David Lynch was throwing us into the heart of the world’s first nuclear explosion to the tune of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima” – when I had to stop myself from genuflecting to the screen.

When Episode 3 went out, I figured we’d seen the most avant-garde piece of TV drama we were ever likely to. But nothing – not even the excellent two-minute sequence in Episode 6 devoted to the guy sweeping up cigarette butts while Booker T & The MG’s “Green Onions” grooved out – prepared anyone for this. By the end of the hour, when Lynch had brought all the abstraction to heel, and the episode had become a 1950s desert horrorshow, it was genuinely nightmarish. Or rather, it felt like being trapped deep inside someone else’s sooty nightmare, with no possibility of waking.

This episode’s achievement can be measured in many ways. It’s impressive, for one thing, that, despite being so bananas, everything –phantom burned woodsmen; the White Sands nuclear test of July 1945 creating a rip in reality that stirs cosmic forces to vomit out wild evil; a floating giant emitting a fizzy golden head bubble with Laura Palmer’s face – made perfect mysterious sense within Twin Peaks’ dense internal logic. Equally, it continues the deeply personal nature of the project, conjuring echoes of Lynch’s entire body of work (the White Lodge looks like Dune remade as Eraserhead), while honing in on everything that moves him, and everything that drives him to fury and despair.

Above all, though, especially when fear of abstraction and theatre in British TV is so acute 99 per cent of our dramas look exactly the same, the flat out experimentation is astonishing. Lynch and Kubrick are very different, but something Kubrick once said seems apposite: “I don’t like to talk about 2001 much. Because it’s essentially a nonverbal experience. It attempts to communicate more to the subconscious and to the feelings than it does to the intellect.” Amen. Whatever this is, it’s TV you’ll actually remember 25 years from now. Again.