No Stone’s left unturned
SATURDAY night, the end of an intense week of heat, seemed like a good one for reflecting. Two very different life stories were a good vehicle for it with BBC2 screening films about author Roald Dahl and Rolling Stone Keith Richards. As befits a man of 72 who still wears tight trousers and eyeliner, the latter film KEITH RICHARDS: THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES (Saturday BBC2) flouted documentary convention.
The face of Keef himself, knotted and blasted like some ancient oak tree, floated in and out, along with a splendidly croaky voiceover, reminiscing gently like someone propping up an airport bar.
A montage of film clips flickered by, from the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties. They formed a bit of a dreary package, the same job-lot of council houses, kids on bombsites and coffee shop hipsters we’d seen in a dozen documentaries before.
Luckily we had Keith, in his strange mix of Dartford Cockney and transatlantic hepcat, talking insightfully about his life. Lots of lines he came out with sounded like snatches of songs, things you’d remember later. He grew up in a house of music thanks to his mum, an avid radio listener. “She knew the dials,” Keith said, then went on to discuss the marshes where “I saw my first dead man.”
As he spoke, the soundtrack played with the memories. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction as he remembered the ads on TV. You Can’t Always Get What You Want as he recalled the school choir.
The account ended as he met Mick Jagger on a train, clutching a rare blues record Keith would gladly have robbed him for.
“We rehooked,” Keith clarified. “Mick and I have known each other since we were four years old. But he doesn’t like talking about that.”
He gave a private chuckle then said nothing else. Like all the best stories, you were left wanting more.
It was to a great creator of stories that we owed the evening’s second treat. THE MARVELLOUS WORLD OF ROALD DAHL (Saturday, BBC2) also took a novel approach. Instead of starting with the writer’s birth and ending with the inevitable, this film picked 12 episodes from all over.
They were a fine dozen, each revealing something about the man and the relation to his work.
At Dahl’s boarding school his class was selected to test new chocolate bars, making him fantasise about a sweetie development unit in some distant factory.
It’s not hard to see how this germ of an idea grew into the classic Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. The monsters, human and otherwise, of his children’s tales came from a variety of sources, from the old crone who was in charge of the school tuck shop to the deadly snake he saw in Africa.
That certain darkness in his most beloved tales had origins perhaps in a series of tragedies that hit Dahl and his family throughout the Sixties. Even then though he had a way of turning something awful into something funny.
When his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, was recovering from a stroke she got words muddled up and invented new ones. Her verbal entanglements turned into the “snozzcumbers” and “whizzpoppins” of The BFG.
It’s how all writers work of course, turning not just life’s “small number of great events” but also the “great number of small events” into story wonder. As much as a portrait of the late, great Dahl, this was a portrait of writing itself.