Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 1 July

It would be impossible to over­state, I think, the influ­ence that Walking to New Orleans had on me – my taste in tele­vi­sion, music and sense of humour.

It was the first time that the irrev­er­ent bunch at Channel 4’s Friday night music show, The Tube, had been giv­en a decent budget and told to go off and make a doc­u­ment­ary. This they did, and they also rewrote all the rules about music docos as they did it.

The setup is that Tube presenter Jools Holland is walk­ing – in cool black and white – on a path beside the Thames with his Squeeze band­mate, Gilson Lavis. A portent­ous Stephen Fry voi­ceover sug­gests that some­thing is about to hap­pen that will change the young man’s life. Fellow Tube presenter Paula Yates (RIP) offers a quick assig­na­tion in the back of a car before her pimp (Robbie Coltrane) takes over and furi­ously per­suades the bemused Holland to accept a trip New Orleans along with the cred­it card, fire­arms and sunglasses that are the neces­sary accessor­ies for such a journey.

(Coltrane is hil­ari­ous: “Do you have any – what we like to call – money as such? You know, fold­ing pieces of paper with pic­tures of the Queen on them? Money?”)

Holland then com­mences his walk to New Orleans through the damp Greenwich foot tun­nel under the Thames, ser­en­aded by Sting play­ing his cur­rent hit, “Moon Over Bourbon Street”. After dis­patch­ing Sting with one of the afore­men­tioned fire­arms, Holland emerges from a dank and over­grown rail­way under­pass in steamy Louisiana.

Over the next 90 minutes or so, Holland gives us a rough and ready guided tour of Louisiana music, includ­ing rent­ing an impromptu con­vert­ible Oldsmobile from Lee Dorsey, piano les­sons from Fats Domino, and live per­form­ances from Allen Toussaint, The Neville Brothers, Dr. John and many more. In the pro­cess he goes to prove what an enorm­ous tele­vi­sion tal­ent he would become (along with those prodi­gious key­board skills).

The Tube was such a breath of fresh air when it star­ted on the new Channel 4 in 1982. Previously, young British music fans would have to put up with the lame lip-synching of Top of the Pops or the beau­ti­fully recor­ded but all-too-serious rock of The Old Grey Whistle Test – which was on far too late at night for me in any case.

The Tube was like a music ver­sion of the ‘altern­at­ive com­edy’ scene of the early 80s and the cros­sov­er between them – Rik Mayall also appears – is anoth­er high­light of Walking to New Orleans.

The film wasn’t re-broadcast and has nev­er been made avail­able on DVD – for music licens­ing reas­ons, I pre­sume. I was a ded­ic­ated record­er of music tele­vi­sion at the time and have car­ried my VHS copy of the ori­gin­al broad­cast with me around the world for nearly 40 years, watch­ing it reg­u­larly, even­tu­ally intend­ing to digit­ise it for pos­ter­ity. Imagine my sur­prise to find that someone else has already done it. Not only had they already done it, but their record­ing was from a clean­er trans­mis­sion than my slightly ghosty ver­sion (remem­ber, when TV aer­i­als had to be aligned cor­rectly and it wasn’t always pos­sible to get per­fect pic­ture on every channel?).

Like me, they also knew that video­tape in the 80s was expens­ive and didn’t record the com­mer­cials. After all, why would any­one in the future ever want to watch old TV ads?

Here’s an embed­ded pre­view of part one:

The com­plete eight-part playl­ist can streamed here.

Where to watch Walking to New Orleans

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Streaming on YouTube