French pop a la BBC (repeat)

Attention French pop fans! A bit of Gallic eye candy to feast yr mincers on...

I blogged about these before, but I shall give them a mention again, as both shows were repeated last night on good ol' BBC4.

Exotic Pop at the BBC has a sultry Juliette Greco and a painfully awkward Françoise on it; plus Monsieur Aznavour in a terrible jacket, Plastic Bertrand after one too many fizzy pops, and jail-bait era Vanessa Paradis.
It is available on the iPlayer until 12:29AM Mon, 29 Apr 2013 >> WATCH IT HERE

Anyone For Demis? How The World Invaded The Pop Charts, meanwhile has "the French Cliff Richard" Johnny Halliday, Françoise on Eurovision and The Piccadilly Show, Serge &  Jane, and Mademoiselle Paradis again.
Available on t'iPlayer until 1:29AM Mon, 29 Apr 2013 >> WATCH IT HERE

Here's a full run down of the unmissable bits (from the point of view of yr humble, but obviously superlatively taste-driven, scribe): Wot I said last time about them two programmes wot were shown on the BBC

Sweet tooth

Back in August when I reviewed the FG compilation Made In France I was bemoaning the fact it was missing the France/Serge duet Dents De Lait, Dents De Loup, and how it would make a lot of people (i.e. me and my many personalities) woop with joy to have a well-mastered audio clip of that theme from the one-off Gallic 60s TV music show directed by Pierre Koralnik and Jean-Pierre Spiero in early 1967.

Well reader, I finally stopped my griping and done it myself.

And so I gift it to all of you out there on the interweb, ripped in high-quality from my very own collection.

France Gall et Serge Gainsbourg - Dents De Lait, Dents De Loup

Whilst I was about it, I figured I may as well kill 2 mp3s with one, er, audio-rip, and did this one too.

Just watch that knowing old rascal Serge smirking to himself as naive miss Gall sings about sweet little Annie and her love of aniseed lollipops...

Just in case you are completely in the dark, some bright spark has altruistically pasted together a load of archive clips to explain the story behind the song.

And here it is, it's not available in the shops (or anywhere else as far as I know), c'est Serge and France duetting together on  l'émmission Dents De Lait, Dents De Loup circa 1967, as seen in that there video above.

France Gall et Serge Gainsbourg - Les Sucettes
 
If you enjoyed these two vintage French pop rarities, please leave a comment to let me know. Merci x

Jonathan Meades on France

If I was the controller at BBC, I'd just go ahead and give Jonathan Meades his own channel to programme as his whim took him. Alas, I am not the controller of the BBC or any other TV channel, but I can console myself that at least Meades has got a 3-part documentary about France that I can watch on BBC4 over the next couple of weeks.

Part 1 "Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia" was on last Wednesday (and is available on the iPlayer until 9:59PM Wed, 8 Feb 2012:

"Jonathan Meades travels through Lorraine and explains why, although close to its eastern border, it has become the symbolic, or even mystical, heart of France and a stronghold of a romantic nationalism that is also expressed by such diverse means as typography, music, engineering, exquisite urbanism and, above all, a sensitivity to Germany's proximity."

[choice references include the Mistral typeface, Le Corbusier, Pascal Haüsermann's bulle dwellings (see below), and I give bonus points for some tasty incidental music including France Gall's 'Le temps de la Rentrée']



Part 2 "A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries" airs on BBC4 this Wednesday at 9pm:

"France granted independence to its colonies in the 1960s. That, anyway, is the official line. In fact, through such agencies as Francophonie which notionally promotes the French language and the secretive Francafrique which wields influence throughout much of Africa, the French state is in reality still a colonial power. Jonathan inspects the Parisian palaces of tyrannical dynasties, the sites of political murders and the village where the Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile."

There is no info about Part 3 yet, but it follows the week after, same day, same time.