HOW THE BEATLES ROCKED THE KREMLIN
BBC4 Sunday, 8pm TRAWLERMEN
BBC1 Wednesday, 8pmI'M USELESS with money. Just ask my IFA (independent financial adviser – come on, keep up). Recently Jon found a few thousa
nd quid I didn't know I had. That makes me seem rich; I'm not. He was simply carrying out one of his reviews, moving my paltry savings hither and yon, and he lifted up a stone or possibly a mattress and there it was. I've always chucked the financial sections of the paper in the bin (sorry Terry, Business Ed) and never used to watch money programmes on the box, not even The Money Programme in my youth when I watched pretty much everything. Great theme music, though. Sadly you can't buy it on iTunes.
But I watch them all now. Since the great crash anything loot-themed has become a must-see. I draw the line at Robert Peston's special reports, though. There's always this big fanfare before them, like suddenly he's the story. Only Peston can tell us what this means! It's not Tuesday until he decrees it!
The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers was a dramatisation of the pivotal moment in the crisis; what the noted cultural historian Sir Alex Ferguson would call "squeaky bum time". The biggest bankers cancelled their plans for that September weekend to debate the fate of one of their own. Mercifully they stayed in their suits throughout. Shorts and deck shoes would have set the wrong tone.
No one went home or even ordered in pizza. Only one banker tried to leave the Wall Street tower, took a haymaker to the jaw, and quickly ran back inside. This was Dick Fuld, Lehman's CEO, who was excluded from the discussions chaired by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Lehman, of course, ended up being sacrificed. As someone pointed out: "Everyone before them and everyone after got bailed out."
Fuld wasn't quite hung, drawn and quartered as a warning to others, but he was found by the Masters of the Universe in the executive washroom, flailing in the dark at the movement-sensitive lights. His building wasn't working and his bank was stuffed. He must have a felt a right Fuld.
This was a memorable image but unfortunately the only one. The long table, all the arguing, put you in mind of 12 Angry Men; the script didn't. James Cornwell, though, was commanding as Paulson and he got what counted for The Big Speech: "The west is f****d, we f****d it up, done and over. You want your grandchildren speaking Chinese? The dollar is going to go. We had Rome, then Europe, then this, us. Cars, stereos and hula-hoops and we screwed it up."
After Jon's incredible find, never again will I tease him with one of Steve Coogan's best lines from Saxondale, directed at a fellow therapy-group patient who claimed to have to have an "on the edge" existence: "You were living on the edge of Windsor. Shine on you crazy diamond-slash-financial adviser." That could be my favourite piece of Coogan, though this exchange from I'm Alan Partridge runs it close: Motel bellboy: "Who are Wings?" Partridge: "Only the band the Beatles could have been."
There was lots of Fab Four-related stuff last week. The documentary How The Beatles Rocked The Kremlin must have been an eye-opener to any young person who will never know what it feels like to be excluded; denied a plastic wig in the style of their favourites. Before spin-off merchandise tyrannies targeting absolute everyone there was the tyranny of communism, which tried to convince Soviet youth that the Beatles were "western pollution". Propaganda films warned about a group who "wore only swimming trunks with toilet seats round their necks".
But when the films didn't have the desired effect the authorities sent their goons onto the streets to shave moptops and watch the airports for smuggled records. Beatles music was banned but the kids would not be denied. In streetside recording booths meant for homesick soldiers' sound-letters to Mum, and using discarded X-ray plates found in hospital refuse, they made bendy bootlegs which could be hidden up coat sleeves and passed around. That way, as the voiceover put it, the insurgent youth listened to I Feel Fine on Uncle Yuri's lungs.
All the Russki reminisces were great although I was slightly suspicious of Sergei Ivanov, Vladimir Putin's deputy prime minister, who sounded a bit like Official Fan, especially when he sang: "Woke up, made my bed/Dragged a comb across my head." Isn't it "got out of bed"? Maybe bed-making was compulsory under commie rule, though.
Unlike her big brother, my sister never had a different teen idol every week. So it was a surprise when, well into her forties, she wrote her first-ever fan letter. The recipient was Jimmy Buchan, one of the Trawlermen. It was sent c/o Fraserburgh Harbour so I hope it got there. She loves this show and so do I. Bizarrely not made by BBC Scotland but BBC Landlocked Birmingham, it's just been bumped up to an hour. Ken Stott's narration is cranked tighter than a prawn net. Were the boys about to return for the fourth run shouting "Woohoo!" and "Way to go!" like they do on Deadliest Catch? Nae chance.
