How a rock band changed Ireland – then the world
You’ve got to love a rock-doc with a thesis. In the mid-1970s, before The Boomtown Rats stuck a snotty middle finger up at the Pope and Big Tom Mcbride, Ireland was a one-horse peat bog populated by Father Ted and the cast of a Martin Mcdonagh play. Then Bob Geldof and the gang thrashed out Lookin’ After No 1 and, poof, the nation was transformed into a liberal utopia. Well, not quite, but Citizens of Boomtown: The Story of the Boomtown Rats (BBC Two) wanted to leave us in no doubt of the band’s seismic impact. “The Boomtown Rats changed the world,” said Geldof, bashfully.
It was, all in all, pretty convincing, even if the main voices we heard belonged to the band and their contemporaries, which meant there was the whiff of Brian Pern – Rhys Thomas’s prog-rock spoof – about proceedings. Bono described rock bands as an “efficient unit for change”, neatly summing up his own band, U2; Sting praised Geldof ’s intelligence by comparing it to his own; Jools Holland praised the Rats by comparing them to Squeeze; while Sinead O’connor fretted, hypothetically, about being “too s--t in bed” for Geldof.
Aside from those muso aphorisms, however, there was a lot to get your teeth into in Billy Mcgrath’s film. The strongest section came in the middle, as the band, having conquered Ireland and the UK, tried to break America. “I thought they would fall prostrate at our feet,” said Geldof. “Dude… they couldn’t give a f--k.” PR stunts failed – 1,000 dead rats mailed out to DJS; invading radio stations to tell them all American music was lousy – while Geldof went one further than John Lennon by saying the Rats were bigger than Bruce Springsteen. Jesus is one thing, Bob, but the Boss is quite another.
There were interesting diversions into Band Aid, Live Aid and Paula Yates, and it was instructive to hear that the British press thought Geldof was a hellraiser from the wrong side of the tracks, while the Irish press had him pegged as an ungrateful public school brat. Seeing how I Don’t Like Mondays, inspired by an American high school shooting, was written and then first performed as the band toured the US, was spine-tingling.
Watching the band’s decline was somewhat diluted by the knowledge that this film is supporting the re-formed Rats’ latest album, and quite what the significance of that recurring image of a Christ-like figure in a gas mask was I’ll never know, but this was a thunderously enjoyable postcard from the past. Chris Bennion
Snowpiercer, Netflix’s dystopian 10-part thriller, began life in 2013 as South Korea’s most expensive film. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, now a household name after winning a sweep of Oscars earlier this year for Parasite, it starred Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton and was a thrillingly mad futuristic creation set in a world that had entered a new Ice Age, so the remainder of humanity had packed onto a giant train that traversed the globe, with the carriages divided into a strict class system.
This TV series is an unusual one – and not because of that bizarre set-up. To enjoy it, it’s actually better to have not watched the film. Entirely within its own context and with all hopes of plausibility cast to the wind, the series is a stylish and refreshing take on a detective drama. Because, strangely, that is how this story has been adapted for TV. Daveed Diggs (best known as one of the original cast of Hamilton) is a “tailie” – one of the starving underclass that lives at the very tail of the train – who is on the verge of planning a rebellion when he’s pulled out because there’s been a murder. And, as he’s told by Jennifer Connolly’s immaculate train manager, “you’re the only homicide detective on board the train”. And, as we see, so coddled are those in the upper classes, that solving murders is far beyond them.
To make the film Joon-ho had to go to war with Harvey Weinstein, who insisted on major rewrites. But Joon-ho won some of those battles. It’s a similar story with the series, which also went through extensive changes, with writer Josh Friedman leaving the project and director Scott Derrickson reportedly hating the new script so much that he left too. In the end it was made by new showrunner Graeme Manson and British TV director James Hawes.
Compared to the film, the series is derivative in the extreme. Plenty of set pieces – such as rebels having their arm frozen off as punishment – remain. But, based on the first two episodes that have arrived on Netflix today (there will be one per week hereafter), it’s a pale imitation if you’re already familiar with its source material. Catherine Gee
Citizens of Boomtown: The Story of the Boomtown Rats ★★★★ Snowpiercer ★★★