Like everyone else, I’m looking forward to the opening of Jersey Boys next month, easily the best ever pop song compilation show — and there isn’t even a song until twenty minutes in — and I include the deliriously enjoyable Mamma Mia!

The songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are better than Abba’s, for a start. And they date from the start of the quality pop era in America between Elvis and the Beatles. They were still onstream from the days of Frank Sinatra.

Such thoughts are prompted by a nice Radio 4 documentary this morning about girl groups and, as always happens when I hear music I really love, I think it’s the best music there is. Three songs in this programme are among my all-time favourites: “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles, “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes and “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-las.

The first is a heart-breaking anthem of teenage angst; the second a majestic example of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” style; the third a miniature soap opera with cute lyrics. All were the stuff of legend, the work of black (and white) girl bands.

I’m as interested in what Amy Winehouse and Duffy get up to in the recording studio as anyone. They are terrific artists. But they don’t seem to me to yet have that defining grace and individuality of the early Sixties iconic girl groups; we shall see.

I once lived in the same street as Bananarama, and that’s about the only thing of any interest I can say about them.

Radio 4 has also just launched another fascinating new documentary series on landmark television sitcoms. The first programme considered was Rising Damp by Eric Chappell, in which the late, great Leonard Rossiter was sublimely bigoted and blinkered as a small-time landlord, Rigsby, dealing with his tenants played by Frances de la Tour (the languorous, vaguely sex-starved Miss Jones), Don Warrington (an educated black man whose supposed lineage from a bunch of chieftains made him acceptable to Rigsby) and the late, cherubic Richard Beckinsale.

The series derived from an original stage play, The Banana Box — which I had the  pleasure of publishing in Plays and Players in the early 1970s — and which was turned down by every West End management, opening at Hampstead Theatre to mixed reviews and then a couple of unsuccessful tours.

Blues singer Paul Jones, later of Manfred Mann and Guys and Dolls at the National, recounted how he turned down the Beckinsale role on television (as well as an invitation to join the Rolling Stones!).

The play was no classic, but the sitcom certainly was, cast to perfection and catching all sorts of anxieties of the period on the wing: dodgy landlords, big city loneliness, racism veiled in a show of polite tolerance, the awkwardness of enforced proximity in rented accommodation. I once lived in a flat in Kilburn with a very similar sort of set-up (not with Bananarama).

Above all, Rossiter’s Rigsby was one of the great fictional characters of our time, comparable to Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwearing, John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett or the Steptoes of Wilfrid Bramble and Harry H Corbett.

None of these characters were particularly sympathetic, and most of them represented values and standards we would abhor. They were our safety valve for the nasty side or ourselves — and they were all brilliantly funny and brilliantly written and acted. There’s nothing as good today on televison, just as there’s nothing as good in pop as the Shirelles. Or am I just being culturally regressive?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.