Pop Screen is going a bit off the beaten track this week, but rewardingly so. Peter Watkins is a maverick British director whose previous film The War Game was banned on the instruction of then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson, so when he was hired by Universal to make a teen-focused rock and roll film they probably expected something insurrectionary. What they might not have expected is for Watkins to train his satirical weapons on the pop world they were hoping to tap into, in this documentary-style tale of a singer whose popularity is exploited by a totalitarian government.
The singer is played by Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones, and the tunes are good enough for one of them to be covered by Patti Smith. That’s just one of the many discoveries Graham and Mark make on this week’s show, and they still have time for generous digressions about the voiceover in The Hateful Eight, the career of screenwriter Johnny Speight and what Volodymyr Zelenskyy might have learned from network censors.
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