Rock Follies Of '77 [1977] [DVD]

Things start optimistically when the group embrace the spin of a "ferret-faced reporter": "Even we believed the lie - We're the band who wouldn't die". They go on tour with Stevie Streeter (Tim Curry - excellent), then make a management deal with Kitty Schreiber (Beth Porter in a funny caricature) that leads to a record, press junkets and more touring, this time with a Punk band. There are flashes of success, good and bad luck, pain, jealousy, anger. On the way they cross paths with an array of British acting talent, including Ian Charleston, Denis Lawson and Bob Hoskins.

The Little Ladies are up against the rest of the world, but their main problems are with each other. Julie Covington's Dee, Charlotte Cornwell's Anna and Rula Lenska's Q ostensibly represented lower, middle and upper classes at the start of the first series, but they are now real individuals and it is their personalities that spark, not their backgrounds. Q's facade of camp (in the first series) has been stripped to reveal her as vulnerable and lovable. Anna, increasingly threatened by Dee's talent, heads for a breakdown, aided by the ready supply of drugs from her lover, Angel. Dee is the only one who finds real success, in a revamped Little Ladies that excludes the other two, yet she too is damaged by the destruction of the group.

Howard Shuman, writer and lyricist, drives the plot deftly with less humour than in the first series, but with deeper humanity, perhaps partly derived from watching the three principals interact with each other in rehearsals, then refining the fictional characters to more closely draw on their real personalities.

Andy Mackay produces some good songs (with Shuman's lyrics), including the single "OK" that was, in the context of the story, supposed to flop, but in real life became a top ten hit.

The acting quality is higher in the second series than the original. The returning characters are less demonstrative, more subtle. The single-shot scenes of Dee and Spike are particularly good, with Billy Murray's underplaying moving Spike from the stereotype of the first series to the full character of the second. Julie Covington's performance is pitch perfect, dramatically as well a musically, from her stillness in some of the Spike dialogues to the exuberance of "Roll Your Own" (where, with her curly hair and long smock she looks uncannily like Mister Frodo enjoying Bilbo's birthday). Rula Lenska conveys the insecurities of Q with real subtlety, at least until the final episode where her plot strand goes back to the more cartoony flavour of parts of the first series. Charlotte Cornwell probably has the hardest role to play, and handles the confrontations with real intensity that makes her sympathic, in spite of all the plot points being lined up in Dee's favour. In the songs, though, she lacks the conviction the others bring. Perhaps that's intentional, but the denoument would have been more intense if the music more clearly meant as much to Anna as to Dee.

Rock Follies has been called prescient because of the similarities between the Little Ladies and later girl groups. But it's the differences between the series and reality that really stand out. Between dashes of measured irony, Rock Follies' ultimate "truth" was that an alliance between talent and mediocrity would eventually dissolve so talent could go up and mediocrity out. But that message has been comprehensively undermined by real life. Group after group has made it big with marginally talented members being carried by others. Even the Spice Girls (a supposed 1990s version of the Little Ladies) held together a range of talents wider than Dee, Anna and Q. The flip side is that talent of the stature of Julie Covington -- already much bigger in the real world of 1977 than Dee in the Rock Follies -- made it no higher, seemingly by choice. At the time, Covington made artistic decisions -- the sort where integrity is traded for current benefit. The dark mystery of these decisions is that they are also trading risks of future regret. If a producer were ever again to agree that a musical drama serial could be primetime TV, then the story of Julie Covington would not make a bad subject: what happens when the possessor of a huge talent decides not to be a superstar?