Radio programme featuring the Flamingos' Chance recordings

If you have explored further than the most recent posts in this blog, you will know that it was set up to archive posts from a doo wop messageboard, and that a favourite subject of those messages was the Flamingos' recording of Golden Teardrops. This was recorded for the small Chicago label Chance, before the group went to Parrot Records then found success at Chess Records.

Imagine: Ray Davies - Imaginary Man (BBC documentary) available again

As Julien Temple's documentary Ray Davies: Imaginary has just been repeated on the BBC, it's once again briefly available on BBC iplayer here, this time until 1:09AM Mon, 25th July. Below, a repost of my response to its original broadcast.

 Have just finished watching the above BBC TV documentary about Ray Davies and a review in the Independent, readable here, gets it roughly right, so I probably won't say too much more. The review ends:

if there was a lingering sense that Davies was being indulged, that his nostalgia was slipping into downright despondence, we could forgive him on the grounds that he has done so much for us.

LENNONYC BBC (Imagine: Lennon: The New York Years)

This is to alert UK readers that the PBS documentary about John Lennon's final years, LENNONYC,  has just been broadcast on the BBC - as part of Alan Yentob's Imagine documentary strand, appropriately enough - and should be available on iplayer  shortly, I presume for the usual time of one week, so hurry, hurry, hurry if you didn't catch it last night. (BBC website page with iplayer link here.)

[Update looks like it's not going to be on iplayer after all - which may suggest to the cynically minded that a UK DVD release is planned.]

I don't know how much Mr Yentob interposes himself between the viewer and the material on this particular occasion, as I missed the start, but on the BBC website the film is clearly credited to the director, Michael Epstein.

Mr Epstein's is a name is etched in my mind because of the excellent series of free-to-download podcasts of raw interview material for the documentary in which he can be heard gently prompting - and occasionally prodding - interviewees to talk about matters which, in some cases, they haven't discussed publicly before.

Tripper's Day (Leonard Rossiter sitcom)

A DVD has recently been issued of Leonard Rossiter's last sitcom, Triipper's Day, written by Brian Cooke. It will, I imagine, sell on the strength of Rossiter's name - and it is indeed worth acquiring for his performance if you are already a fan.

The casual purchaser needs to be warned, however, that this is not another Rising Damp or Reggie Perrin: but a broad and knockabout sitcom of the sort which might have been more common when it aired in 1984.