THE
CRITICSJAMES COWENTELEVISION
You cannot
hide Sid’s
vicious side
Pistol Disney+
Elizabeth: The Unseen
Queen BBC1, Sat
The Crown Jewels BBC1, Fri
Stranger Things Netflix
It’s the fate of all successful
rebellions to be domesticated,
and so it’s the fate of punk to
be memorialised in a six-part
drama that is basically The
Crown with gobbing.
Pistol, directed by Danny
Boyle and based on the
memoir Lonely Boy by the Sex
Pistols guitarist Steve Jones
(played here, with some
swagger, by Toby Wallace),
was timed as an alternative to
the week’s festival of rampant
royalism. Forty-five years
since the 1977 Silver Jubilee
also means 45 years since the
Pistols’ sneering God Save the
Queen almost got to No 1, and
everyone got to have a good
old worry about the morals of
the nation’s youth.
Yet this drama was a
heritage industry production.
It just invites you to feel edgy
while you wallow in the past.
No wonder John Lydon, the
Pistols’ frontman, tried to
stop them using the music: he
has spent a career building a
reputation as an obnoxious
jerk, and now he gets the
Princess Margaret treatment,
with a wild-eyed Anson Boon
playing him as a man whose
prickly outer demeanour
hides a vulnerable core. So
much for the Antichrist.
There were some good
touches. The use of archive
footage, cut-and-paste style,
injected punk sensibility. And
it captured the ground-down
grottiness of 1970s Britain
well. (Or I think it did. I wasn’t
there, but that’s how the 1970s
looked in The Crown.)
The soundtrack, supervised
by Underworld, was great at
fleshing out the musical world
into which punk erupted — a
fight scene set to Hawkwind
was a highlight. The same
couldn’t be said for the
dialogue: the moment when
Vivienne Westwood (Talulah
Riley) asked Malcolm McLaren
(Thomas Brodie-Sangster) if
he really wanted to manage
another band “after what
happened with the New York
Dolls” was as subtle as a
nipple piercing.
Every character who was
introduced might as well have
been wearing a “Hello my
name is ...” badge. It’s Chrissy!
It’s Siouxsie! It’s Nancy!
Ah, Nancy Spungen, the
woman who selfishly ruined
punk by dying, with the
Pistols bassist, Sid Vicious,
accused of her murder. The
episode about her death was
called Nancy and Sid, which
suggested there might be an
attempt at putting her story
first. But Emma Appleton
played her as a grasping loon,
and Louis Partridge’s Vicious
was more lost boy than
psychopath. When she died
we were invited to feel more
sorry for him than for her.
Pistol failed because it
wanted to be a story about a
brave band of ragtag heroes
confronting the
complacency of the
British public, when
the actual narrative
of the band was all
nastiness, brutality
and getting ripped
off by McLaren. In
the end it chopped upThe Queen and Princess
Margaret as little girls in
matching dresses; the Queen
as a newlywed, smiling
beatifically at Prince Philip; a
young Philip doing charmingly
manly things with his top off.
It was all rather sweet, and
even came with a voiceover by
HRH herself. “One of the joys
of living a long life is watching
one’s children,” she said,
over footage of a small and
frowning Charles. “We can’t
be certain what lies ahead for
them but we should know
enough to put them on the
right path.” It would be cheap
and possibly treacherous to
make a joke about Andrew
and the path to Woking Pizza
Express here, so I won’t.
The jubilee solemnities
resumed with The Crown
Jewels, presented by the
BBC’s chief Important Things
correspondent, Clive Myrie.
The introduction tried to
inject a note of peril by asking
whether the jewels are just
“relics of a bygone era”, to
which the answer had betterbe no, given that we were
being asked to watch a whole
hour of television about them.
Myrie did a fine job of
looking at huge gemstones and
expressing how inexpressibly
sparkly they are. He’s good
at conveying the kind of
unobtrusive curiosity a
programme like this needs,
talking to experts about the
historical significance of
different pieces, and gamely
having a crack at crown-
making for himself.
Actually, The Crown Jewels
took a more sceptical line on
its subject than Pistol does,
especially when delving into
the history of the Koh-i-Noor
— the giant diamond that
passed bloodily between
various Indian rulers, until
the British snapped up the
gemstone along with India
itself, then ground the
Koh-i-Noor down to almost
half its size to suit Victorian
tastes. It’s as good a metaphor
for empire as you could find.
The documentary struck
a solid balance betweenthe chronology rather than
ending on a downer. Ever
get the feeling you’ve been
cheated?
Elizabeth: The Unseen
Queen also felt a lot like
watching The Crown, but that
was because this
compilation of the
Queen’s home
movies — made
public to mark the
Platinum Jubilee —
was eerily full of
moments recently
dramatised on Netflix.This sanitised story of the Sex Pistols is
really The Crown for nostalgic punks
The dialogue
was about
as subtle as
a nipple
piercing
No future? Pistol started the
jubilee by wallowing in historySARAH
DITUM
12 5 June 2022