The words come from Andrew Carnegie, the Elon Musk of his day, and they mirror this engaging biopic’s path to the screen. First shown on a paid for streaming service this time last year, Everything is Possible is now on the mass market BBC for free (that’s licence fee “free”). I’d like to think the voracious Scottish capitalist turned philanthropist would have approved.
The trajectory also suits the two driving forces behind the band, Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, who famously met on a pile of builders’ sand in the new scheme of Toryglen, then being thrown up around them as fast as the council could demolish the city centre tenements. From this “desert wi windaes”, as Billy Connolly put it, came two kids who would one day sell out stadiums in America. It could be a ridiculously schmaltzy tale except for the saving grace that it is true.
Simple Minds (Image: free) But was their success inevitable? One of the things that shines through Joss Crowley’s film is how determined Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill were to succeed. They were thinking big from the off and if you weren’t on the bus you were pretty soon booted off it. Band members not putting in the work, sacked. Producers and record companies who didn’t “get” the Simple Minds sound, binned. Don’t let the twinkly old dudes of today fool you: this pair were tough and ruthless when they felt it necessary.
Crowley has assembled a choir of Scottish talking heads to testify to the band’s talent and significance, including Sharleen Spiteri. Bobby Gillespie, Irvine Welsh, and Muriel Gray. It’s an adoring film as such pieces tend to be, and for anyone other than die-hard fans there are dull troughs to get through. Who cares how many copies of X sold from album Y when we could be hearing more about Kerr’s marriage to Chrissie Hynde (described lovingly by the frontman as “a challenge”)?
Forget about the occasionally soggy middle and this is a riveting watch, as much a portrait of a friendship as a chapter of rock and roll history. As a bonus there’s that man Kerr talking Italian in his adopted homeland. Robert De Niro can stand down.
My lucky dog and I received two early Christmas presents: to Hobo a doggy advent calendar, complete with safe for canines chocs, while I unpacked a new documentary, Alan Bennett: 90 Years On (BBC2, Friday). There have been teething troubles with the calendar, the concept of rationing not sitting well with a Labrador. Mr Bennett, in contrast, was a soup to nuts triumph.
Made by Adam Low (The Private Dirk Bogarde, Bacon’s Arena), the hour-long film found the playwright rewatching clips of his key works, something he rarely does, and musing on his life and old age.
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The documentary ties in with a forthcoming film, The Choral, written by Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner. It also stands as a belated birthday tribute to Bennett, who was 90 last May and says he is feeling “every minute of it”. One of the worst parts of growing old, he muses, is that you become like every other old person. “At 60 one is an individual, still. At 90 one is a cliche.”
At one point the discussion turns to Thora Hird’s final Talking Heads, Waiting for the Telegram, in which she plays a pensioner due birthday greetings from the monarch. Bennett recalls that after Hird spoke the last line there was silence in the studio, save for the cameramen crying. The series is still available on iPlayer and remains as brilliant today as when the monologues first aired.
Ashley Jensen and Alison O’Donnell in Shetland (Image: free) Shetland (BBC1, Wednesday) wrapped up series 9, or series 2 if you are new start DI Ruth Calder (played by Ashley Jensen). I was left with mixed feelings about the story, largely because there were so many ingredients in the mix.
The MI5 strand worked a treat, with Ian Hart as a spruced-up Jackson Lamb-type seeking revenge for a fallen colleague, but the rest of it was a grab bag of sub-plots involving at one point a secret medical facility, a drug dealer up from Manchester, and rivalry within a fishing family. After that I lost track.
When the culprit was eventually revealed it felt like they had been plucked out of nowhere at the last minute, which wasn’t fair to the viewer (okay, this viewer) trying to work out whodunnit.
What is working well is the growing friendship between Tosh (Alison O’Donnell) and Ruth. Poor Tosh found out through some Mean Girls bullying by ex-school pals that it is lonely being a cop at the top. Ruth, meanwhile, revealed a softer, lighter side to her character while still terrifying most of the men around her. She even smiled when Tosh teased her about her London love life. They are not Cagney and Lacey just yet, but there’s a genuine spark there that’s going to prove vital to the show.