Television has long been recognised as a crucial means of marketing popular music and creating ‘star’ performers. Similarly, television's appetite for recorded music appears to be insatiable – both as subject matter and as soundtrack. That said, the reciprocal benefits of this symbiosis, though widely accepted in industry and academic discourse, remain problematic to describe, explain and quantify. Popular Music and Television in Britain presents a selection of essays examining the complex and nuanced relationships that bond these two mediums. Editor Ian Inglis states, ‘In theory and in practice, pop and rock have contributed much to, and benefited greatly from, the historical development of television in the UK’ (p. 1). In spite of these strong ties, according to Inglis, a survey of existing academic literature devoted specifically to popular music in British TV finds a disproportionately sparse body of work. The primary objective of this text is to go some way to correcting this apparent imbalance.
The book is divided into four thematically distinct sections: History and Heritage, Performers and Performances, Comedy and Drama and Audiences and Territories. Although thematically demarcated, these categories do not fully prepare the reader for the diverse array of subject matter and disciplinary approaches that can only be touched upon within the confines of this review.
The opening section, History and Heritage, examines how television is used to construct popular music histories. One of the most interesting examinations of the self-conscious construction of popular music history is found in Ian Goode's ‘Pop stardom and auto/biographical narratives’. Goode's investigation scrutinises artists' desire to reveal their ‘authentic’ creative identities and assert their cultural and historical importance by way of highly contrived ‘fly on the wall’-style documentaries that blur the boundaries between biography and autobiography. Using various examples of such documentaries, the author constructs a framework for categorising different types of stars: Pop Star as Rebel, Pop Star as Global Icon and Canonized Rock Star. The main shortcoming of the chapter is the amount of ground it attempts to cover, and this gives the resultant discussion a hurried, cursory feel that leaves many of the thought-provoking themes introduced frustratingly underdeveloped.
The second section, Performers and Performances, illustrates how the non-musical performances of musicians can be more significant than their musical performances. Perhaps the best example of this can be found in Mark Duffet's ‘Sworn in: Today, Bill Grundy and The Sex Pistols’. Duffet examines the now infamous, foul-mouthed meeting of TV chat host Bill Grundy and Punk band The Sex Pistols live on teatime television and considers why this performance had such seismic ramifications for popular music and society at large without a note being played and why it retains such an enduring influence. Beyond the immediate ‘moral panic’ caused by this televisual chaos and the subsequent commercial success of The Sex Pistols, Duffet probes the individual roles played by the main protagonists, Bill Grundy, Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, et al. The author interrogates the way in which audiences ‘remember’ an event, most of whom did not see it in its original context, on live teatime television, and offers the conclusion that it is the ‘Dorian Gray quality’ (p. 103) that confers enduring significance on this somewhat bizarre encounter.
The third section, Comedy and Drama, explores the use of music as subject and as soundtrack in British TV. One of the most impressive essays in the entire volume is ‘A sunken dream: music and the gendering of nostalgia in Life on Mars’ by Estella Tincknell. Life on Mars fuses gritty cop drama with the science fiction genre, juxtaposing the ‘hyper-masculinity’ of a 1970s detective with his time-traveller ‘new man’ colleague, transported from a supposedly ‘enlightened’ 2006 in what the author characterises as exemplars of broadly ‘“pre” and “post” feminist' (p. 161) worldviews. Aside from borrowing a title from a David Bowie single released in 1973, the year in which the drama is set, Tincknell explores how the drama is driven by a ‘… selection of vintage rock and pop that will both code the period and articulate character emotion’ (p. 169). The author convincingly argues that the selection of almost exclusively white, male, British rock music reinforces many of the stereotypes it seeks to critique. Tincknell states, ‘Life on Mars struggles to reconcile an apparently conscious intention to problematise the past with its unconscious desire for the past’ (p. 174). This apparent contradiction between overt and latent message in narrative and soundtrack reappears in the concluding section, Audiences and Territories.
The main focus of Audiences and Territories scrutinises the way in which popular music is used to target geographically and culturally discrete audience groups. Beneath what might be interpreted as a somewhat frivolous title, Nicholas Reyland's ‘The changing musical identities of Postman Pat’ presents a deep and absorbing exploration of the role of television in ‘offering a range of educational, moral and developmental instruction’ (p. 213) for the under-fives. By applying a close musicological analysis Reyland argues there is a significant disconnect between attempts to make the storylines increasingly progressive and politically correct while the hero of the show, Pat, evolves musically into a ‘cliché of masculinity’ (p. 230), thus reinforcing some of the stereotypes that this type of programming apparently seeks to disassemble. Reyland concludes that one day, ‘… that dissonance will have palpable consequences in the everyday thoughts of Pat's fans’ (p. 230). Whether or not one is convinced by this argument is another matter, but this concluding essay is characteristic of the innovative and challenging arguments introduced throughout the book.
In conclusion, it is important to note that this is not a textbook-style overview of the interplay between popular music and British television. Neither does it offer a systematic interrogation of any particular thematic or disciplinary area. In this respect the text may fail to satisfy readers seeking a deeply penetrative exploration of any of these areas. While some of the essays perhaps overreach in the scope of what they attempt to address, most are insightful and thought provoking. As a volume, this book's biggest success is to offer a fascinating indication of the immense potential for further examination of the complex interplay and ‘the opportunities and reciprocities that exist between the two mediums’ (p. 2). In short, this text goes a considerable way towards realising its stated aim of creating a touchstone work for the analysis of popular music and British TV.
