Thinking outside the box is a joy
AMID the oceans of garbage that wash over our screens, two standout moments from 2018 demonstrate that when its creative powers are fully harnessed and used for good rather than stupidity, television can be the most powerful medium.
Coincidentally, both programs involved famous men travelling in cars to revisit the streets of their childhood.
Both programs also move you to tears, only for completely different reasons.
One is from the UK, the other so uniquely Australian that it is hard to recall a more resonant account of life in our more put-upon suburbs.
Sir Paul McCartney’s performance in car pool karaoke with the British late-night host and comedian James Corden is 23 minutes of the purest form of joy. It is joy tinged with melancholy at the fleeting nature of youth.
As of last Friday the segment had been watched 33 million times on YouTube, so forgive me if I’m urging you to watch something you’ve already seen and enjoyed but for those of you who haven’t finish up the newspaper and Google it at once.
Seeing the 76-year-old McCartney revisiting the streets of Liverpool, pointing out all the landmarks that inspired songs such as Penny Lane and concluding with a surprise gig in a local pub for an audience that traverses four generations … this is uniquely moving television.
The documentary version of Jimmy Barnes’ memoir of his childhood Working Class Boy occupies another end of the emotional spectrum.
I read the book, which others have fairly likened to an Australian suburban version of Angela’s Ashes, a couple of years back.
I also had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Barnes when he released its sequel, Working Class Man, the much breezier and bearable account of his adult life with Cold Chisel and as a solo artist. Barnes’ first memoir is so crushingly sad that at times you end up closing its pages to have a bit of a breather.
It was difficult to envisage how a documentary version of the book could capture that same sense of power but the Barnesy doco directed by Mark Joffe does just that.
The chief reason is Barnes himself.
There is a compelling ballsout quality to the matter-offact manner in which Barnes dispassionately describes how alcohol abuse, poverty and domestic violence formed the miserable backdrop to his childhood as a little migrant kid from Glasgow, Scotland who packed up and moved with his family to the failed utopia of Elizabeth, the envisaged satellite city in Adelaide’s outer northern suburbs.
The footage of Barnes casually describing how his friend’s brother attempted to rape him at the age of seven on the day of his release from prison or the brutal retelling of how his father, the prize fighter Jim Swan, punched his mum square in the face, only for his mum to retaliate by laying into the back of her husband’s skull with the steel of her stiletto, all make for a truly jaw-dropping account of a childhood ruined by relentless brutality.
The uplift comes from Barnes’ retelling of how his mother disappeared but then reemerged with a new partner, Reg Barnes. It also comes from the manner in which Barnes managed to put his own demons behind him, to get off the turps and the drugs and straighten up as a loving hus-