busstnactgrp

This was the film on late last night on BBC One, so it was one of those things that one just watches to pass an odd hour or so between the late-evening programmes and bedtime, without really demanding too much of oneself. However, it inevitably raised one of those half-forgotten aspects of British 1970s Popular Culture - the at-the-time ground-breaking BBC TV fly-on-the-wall documentary series 'The Family', set in a working class neighbourhood in nowhere else but Reading. I simply could not help humming the unforgettable signature tune of 'The Family' as I made my way upstairs to bed. I know I have only been on the 'Trivia' and the first page of the 'User Comments', but I am amazed that nobody has thought to mention this parallel, especially given that Gervais' 'The Office' was itself, essentially, filmed as a faux fly-on-the-wall documentary.

As a sort of Northerner, by the way, (well a North MIDLANDER, at any rate!), it's interesting to see the South take for itself a little bit of the 'ownership' of Northern Soul in the night club scene. Maybe that, itself, raises the engaging matter of non-Northern Northern Soul back in the 1970s heyday. I suppose that, like 'The Family' exposed those living in more northern climes to the fact that there were such things as blue collar neighbourhoods in the apparently privileged provincial South and East, one didn't have to have lived in the North to have experienced the essentially blue collar-driven social scene that was Northern Soul....an antidote to 'SoulBoy' and its Stoke-on-Trent setting? Not a film to set the world alight, but one that raises a couple of intriguing questions, nevertheless.