A fascinating insight into young Bowie’s quest for fame
The weekend on television Jasper Rees
When is a rockumentary better than a biography? With Five Years (2013), then The Last Five Years (2017) and now David Bowie: Finding Fame (BBC Two, Saturday), Francis Whately has created an unsurpassable trilogy of feature-length bio-docs, profiling the life of his subject.
This final film explored a young man’s long evolutionary struggle to burst out of suburbia. Bowie’s vehicles of egress included a parade of splendidly naff bands which he hopped on and off like old Routemaster buses. The video evidence, of a London boy faking various looks, was joyous: the Anthony Newley phase, the laughing gnome moment, the famous flirtation with mime (“he was a load of s--t,” confided his instructor Lindsay Kemp).
Kemp, who died last year, was a deserving dedicatee for this cheeky myth-busting insight alone. He joined quite an array of witnesses. The earthy memories of the blokey musos Bowie ran with in those years were fun. But women held the deeper secrets. What a coup to wrench memories from Hermione Farthingale, the shy dancer who so broke Bowie’s heart that he was still sending coded messages to her when he emerged from a decade of silence in 2013. “He was clearly going somewhere,” she said, “and I just didn’t think I was going to tread that path with him.” Your heart broke for him all over again.
An even older flame, Dana Gillespie, intuited that falling in love with Bowie wouldn’t be good for her mental health “because he loved himself extremely”. His cousin Kristina Amadeus was enlightening on Peggy Jones, the shuttered mother whose approval he craved but never won. She also slightly punctured the bubble about Bowie’s obsession with his older half-brother Terry, whose insanity he feared was hereditary.
The great man hovered as a disembodied voice, endlessly fascinated by his own journey but quick to self-mockery. “Why am I doing these things anyway?” he wondered after yet another flop. “I realised it was because I wanted to be well-known.” This was a richly riveting account of how he achieved lift-off in the end.
Been and gone are the days when Inspector Morse scripts were parcelled out among leading playwrights. Russell Lewis has come up with all 27 episodes of Endeavour (ITV, Sunday) since 2012, including four more in this sixth series. It places quite a burden on one imagination to produce satisfactory whodunits.
This episode felt undercooked. The disappearance of one girl consumed much gumshoe time only to be bathetically revealed as the result of a fatal car accident and a far-fetched cover-up which gave the episode its underwhelming title (Pylon).
Another girl’s disappearance took its cue from horrendous news stories of men imprisoning abductees for years. While nodding to Degas and Lewis Carroll, it barely bothered to think about the victims’ psychological scarring nor the kidnap’s slapdash implausibility.
The gain supplied by a scriptwriting monopoly is the daisy-chaining of plot across episodes. Thus we have now got to 1969 and Puccini and Allegri shared house room with a raucous blast of Led Zep. After the unsolved shooting of his sidekick George Fancy (Lewis Peek) last series, a demoted Morse (Shaun Evans) was back in uniform, living over the shop in a rural police station with terrible wallpaper, and wearing a moustache.
The new look triggered an arch exchange with his old flame Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers). “You don’t look like you.” “What does me look like? Maybe I’m not me any more. You?” “I’m still me.” “Well good for you.” The crossword king Colin Dexter would disapprove of these monosyllabic banalities.
Meanwhile, poor old Fred Thursday (Roger Allam, as ever a palatable mix of honey and lime) looked gloomy answering to DCI Ronnie Box (Simon Harrison), a repository of every terrible thought you’ve had about old-school policing. Box was at the heart of this hand-wringing episode about miscarriages of justice, thumping suspects, planting evidence, disrespecting women.
Not that the drama is itself entirely innocent of tampering. Thursday went in on a suspected paedophile with a hard left to the midriff, only for the southpaw to return home with bruises blooming on the knuckles of his right hand. Solve that, Endeavour.
David Bowie: Finding Fame ★★★★★ Endeavour ★★★