Pop Screen continues its dive into the strangest products of the 1980s trend towards long-form music videos with a lost gem of British pop-surrealism – Jack Bond’s It Couldn’t Happen Here, starring the Pet Shop Boys. Arguably the first stumble in the relentless upwards trajectory PSB were enjoying, it’s been disowned by the band and archly reappraised by Bond as “the first post-Brexit movie”.
After joining Graham to review Spice World in Episode 2, Ewan Gleadow makes his Pop Screen return for this utterly befuddling film, which sees Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe embarking on an epic road trip involving existentialist ventriloquist dummies, burning men walking calmly through Kings Cross and Barbara Windsor. We also discuss the label of “irony” that hung around the band’s necks for much of their early careers, their unfortunate habit of releasing anti-consumerist songs whose messages went over the heads of Thatcher’s Britain, and the vexed question of what the best Pet Shop Boys album is.
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“In February, Mark Cunliffe joined the podcast to review That’ll Be the Day, a low budget film starring David Essex as wannabe rock star Jim MacLaine. It was a gritty, down-to-earth take on the early days of rock and roll – certainly, you’d never expect it to have a lavish sequel shot by Nicolas Roeg’s regular cinematographer where MacLaine becomes a megastar, goes to LA and alienates all his old friends while making a prog opera about womanhood“.
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