TV Pop Diaries
Pop Music on British Television 1955 - 1999

Sub-tilted The Story of Popular Music, this seventeen-hour long trek through the history of popular music was directed by recent pop convert Tony Palmer, allegedly after a suggestion by John Lennon.

It was Palmer's intention to write a book about the history of popular music, but as he told Melody Maker in late 1976 "No publisher in the world was going to give me enough money to spend three years tramping around the world researching popular music. The only things was to was persuade a film company to foot the bill." For the series he recorded over a thousand hours of interviews, and 750 hours of film. Research led him to find film clips of Woody Guthrie and Charlie Parker where it was thought none had survived.

Starting the story in Africa and ending with stadium rock of the early seventies Palmer filmed an astonishing amount of artists, commentators and spectators. Palmer had previously attempted a look at the pop scene in 1968 with the sometimes unintentionally comical All My Loving, and some of the footage from this was recycled for All You Need Is Love.

Having made All My Loving and How It Is for the BBC it was to the Beeb that he originally approached with the idea, thinking ITV wouldn t be interested, but they wanted editorial control. Palmer then tried to persuade the record industry to finance it with EMI and PolyGram putting up a million pounds each. PolyGram's Philips label released a tie-in soundtrack album, even including The Beatles title song, alongside a book.

A headline in Melody Maker in late 1976 claimed " History is bunk!" The claims made in the series that ragtime was the dominant influence in early black American music, rather than jazz, and that jazz itself was not a native black art form had music critics piling scorn. Whether Palmer had intended to re-write the history books, or it was just pixie-ish chin-scratching on the part of a newbie running head-first into music genres they don't understand is open to interpretation, but he was prepared for criticism. Talking to Melody Maker he argued "I'm not looking forward to it, but I will not leave the country. I will stay and answer the critics. There are some pretty harsh things said, but we have the evidence, warehouses full of it." He also claimed "It's been sold to 28 countries and we have an offer of an enormous sum of money from an American network provided we change certain things. And I'm certainly not going to."

Accepting some of the previous criticisms of his work he said "The tone of the film is four times harsher than All My Loving. There's nobody being shot in the head, no burning monks and there's no Patrick Allen commentary."

The precious clip of rock critic Lester Bangs often gets repeated out of context of the show, but the series itself seems not to have ben repeated in full.

Palmer went back to his first love, opera afterwards.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

LWT / Theatre Projects

12th February 1977 to 28th May 1977