Episode 1: 10pm, Fri 4 January
In the early 1960s, British pop music ruled the world. Even America had to admit defeat. For the first time since the war, Britain was the best at something.
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Move It
But the British Invasion and Beatlemania almost never happened at all. During the previous 20 years, the British music establishment based in London's Denmark Street and controlled by a nexus of publishers, major record companies and the BBC, had done its best to incorporate every new style of popular music and its performers into what it knew best - show business and the light entertainment industry.
By the end of the 50s, rising affluence and new technologies meant that there was a new generation of post war kids, confident that the world was theirs for the taking. Yet they barely had their own soundtrack. Their imaginations had been captured by American rock and roll and rhythm and blues but homegrown British pop was imitative, patronised by the Establishment and our first pop stars - Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde et al - were happy to do what their elders and betters told them. This was the world that obliged The Beatles to escape to Hamburg to learn their trade, that repeatedly passed on the band and finally and almost reluctantly signed them while replacing their leather jackets with crew necked suits.
This film traces the ebb and flow of the emergence of a British pop dream in the 50s and its struggle to emerge from a conservative, derivative notion of pop dictated by its elders and betters.
Produced by Alan Lewens
