You are reading a single comment by @pajamas and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@pajamas
I have a vhs copy culled from the original BBC master. Trouble is it's got the timecode on it.
You can still see it appear on BBC4 schedules at times but I suppose it's getting rarer. Though if rumours are correct two biopics are due soon so it will probably be dug out again.
It was called "Trouble Man: The Last Days of Marvin Gaye" or something close to that, fond yet saddened memories of watching it the first time it was on with JS. We'd just massively got into him - not yet so into him we had everything though. So the Trouble Man soundtrack accompanying the doc blew my mind. We were eighteen and the world was changing for us by the month.
It's an incredible documentary, that one. Don't know if you remember how it goes but they found some tapes of Marvin speaking to himself late at night about who he felt he was and why he was who he was. So they used these to provide a VO for the film. So Marvin's speaking to you from the grave about his most personal shit. Mindblowing.
These were the last great days of the British documentary tradition, just before "Driving School" became the nation's favourite and reality TV did a big commercial shit all over beautiful, lyrical documentary films made by people who were masters at their craft.
Apparently there are hundreds of documentary films lying around in the BBC that got pulled from the schedules as the reality frenzy took over. Among them are said to be some of the finest documentaries ever made. Lying there, never to be seen because the BBC discovered a new, shit way of fulfilling their doc quota. Nice one BBC.