Such a song and dance over the bossa nova is strictly out of order
Bossa nova, according to Katie Derham, is Brazil’s ‘greatest cultural export’. That’s like saying France’s highest culinary achievement is the Camembert cheese or new Zealand’s finest contribution to the arts is the Lord of The Rings trilogy.
Maybe these things are true, but saying them out loud is so rude that it verges on the racist.
Brazil is a nation of 190 million people. If the best they can do for global culture is to invent the bland background music of shopping malls, they can’t be trying very hard.
all songs with a bossa nova rhythm sound the same: that’s why, when the maracas start to shake, one tune pops into your head. It gave its name to this documentary, The Girl From Ipanema (BBC4), which consisted of enough facts to fill ten minutes, stretched thinly across an hour.
Katie, a former strictly contestant whose father was born in Brazil, started the show strongly. she’s very good at walking and talking to camera, and to prove it she strolled for what seemed to be miles along the Copacabana promenade in Rio without once fluffing her lines.
The elderly musicians who remembered bossa nova’s heyday in the sixties were good value, too, at least to begin with.
‘We were fighting for this wonderful music that will save Brazil,’ sighed one. another tried to describe the sound’s gentle appeal: ‘It is like singing in the ears of a woman, never screaming.’
But Katie quickly lost her way, showing us images of macaws in the rainforest, accompanied by snatches of Chopin and Rachmaninov.
Perhaps this was meant to convey that bossa nova is rooted in the classics, but you might as well argue that the sex Pistols were inspired by stravinsky.
There were gaps in her storytelling, too. We heard how West Coast guitarist Charlie Byrd exported the sound to California in the early sixties and had a huge hit with sax star stan Getz on an LP called Jazz samba.
But Katie omitted to mention how arthouse cinema audiences had already discovered bossa nova, thanks to the soundtrack of the award-winning Black orpheus — set in the favela slums of Rio, with music by antonio Carlos ‘Tom’ Jobim.
Jobim also wrote The Girl From Ipanema. Though the song made him a fortune, and even let him record an album with Frank sinatra, Jobim loathed the English lyrics.
These were added at a later date by norman Gimbel: ‘Tall and tan and young and lovely,’ runs the first line — Jobin thought that sounded like a description of a beauty contest.
Rio half a century ago did look like a fabulous scene. Imagine dropping into Bottles Bar in the mid-sixties to listen to astrud Gilberto or Ella Fitzgerald, surrounded by a generation of beautiful artists, thinkers and dreamers.
Katie urged us to go and relive those memories. she didn’t mention that these days the water is filthy and you’re more likely to meet a mugger on the beach than a girl from Ipanema.
still, the show did include one snippet of trivia that’s bound to be useful in a quiz: Rio’s airport is named after the country’s most famous songwriter . . . Tom Jobim International.
The contestants on Bradley Walsh’s new gameshow, Cash Trapped (ITV), didn’t appear to possess the right level of quizzing knowledge. asked to name the woman for whom Edward VIII gave up his crown, one man said: ‘Marge simpson.’
no, she’s the cartoon woman with blue hair... the right answer was, of course, Wallis simpson.
another chap had to decide which had more legs: two spiders (16 spindly limbs) or five elephants (a total of 20 large legs). He thought hard and said: ‘Two spiders.’ and this bloke was a maths teacher.
To be fair, you’d have to be an oxbridge don to make sense of the rules. six players try to knock each other out by answering general knowledge questions — but the game restarts twice, so no one’s out for long.
Then there’s a quickfire round, before the player with the most winnings takes on the rest against the clock. It’s ludicrously overcomplicated . . . especially for a bunch who think Marge simpson was the Duchess of Windsor.