Alastair McKay The relucant poster boys who sent sales of mascara and bangles through the roof

Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye BBC Four, 9pm

THERE is a lot of duality in Soft Cell. There are two of them. Looking at them now, there is the slight, pretty one; singer Marc Almond. And there is the bluff one, the musician Dave Ball. He looks like a mid-Championship football manager while Almond is a star, albeit on a cloudy night. If you wanted to get all musicological about it, they’re a bit like Sparks, who pre-dated them, or Yello, or Yazoo, who were roughly contemporaneous. The synth duo was a thing, and it often involved moustaches, and alienation. It was a way of being a band without being a band, or even a musician. It was about machine rhythms and human vulnerability.

This film captures Soft Cell on the eve of their 40th anniversary show at the 02 Arena, their biggest ever concert, and possibly their last. It is retrospective, and while it shares the same framework as the celebrated Bros Netflix implosion, Ball and Almond are much less needy than the Goss brothers, and more amused by their past selves.

Certainly, there is darker and more interesting film trying to get out — one in which the sex clubs, the addictions and the terrible toll of Aids in the Eighties are given more room — but as a study of the surface of the duo, it captures their kinks, and a sense of their perversity.

One thing the film can’t quite re-create is the context of the time. In the shorthand, Soft Cell emerged at the time of Mrs Thatcher, riots and unemployment. But that does nothing to explain the post-punk individualism which invaded the body of pop culture, or the way subversion washed through the mainstream. Soft Cell’s appearance