JBee
Active Member
I've just caught up with it and without any adverts it was about an hour in length, so am thinking it had an hour and thirty minutes slot in the schedule. I was surprised that it followed something as big as 'X Factor' and ITV clearly saw it as something that would be popular and worthy of primetime.
Just caught it (thank you ITV), and I thought it was one of the best things done on the Carpenters I've seen in years. Some snippets of new footage (outtakes from the "All You Get From Love" video!) and pictures I've never seen before. It does give one hope that someday maybe some of the complete concerts available (UK, Japan, Australia, Holland) will be remastered for DVD or Blu-Ray. I'd take that for the 50th.
It amazes me sometimes that here in the States critics sometimes still give the side-eye to the Carpenters and their "image" and their soft music (i.e. the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame stuff and the Terry Gross/NPR "corny" lines) yet in the UK (and Japan) the Carpenters still treated without a trace of irony as master musicians and huge stars. Pretty much all of the best Carpenters documentaries since the nineties (and there have been several) have come out of Britain. Good for them.
I was a little surprised at some of the choices (including number one, which I never think of as the "best" Carpenters song or even in my own top 5). It was a very British-centric list, and I guess I should have expected that. We've talked on these forums on how "It's Going to Take Some Time" is something of an old shame for the Carpenters (their first post-"Close to You" song to go out of the top 10 and one they never performed in concert or talked about) and "Jambalaya" didn't even get a single release in the U.S. and both were on this list.
I thought the same about Richard being 'done' with interviews, which is why I cynically thought this would just be rehash of past interviews. Richard is looking pretty good but you can tell that it still upsets him to talk about Karen, but if he lives to be 100 I'm sure that won't change. Time is a great healer that's true, but it doesn't heal completely something as deep as Karen's death.
It is definitely worth a watch as the progamme makers weaved in other tracks as well as the 'top 20' which worked really well. There were also a lot of good contributors.
As others have said, I am not sure how this 'top 20' was voted for but it was still worth watching.
I was very heartened to see Richard (he looked very good). I too thought he was "done" but clearly that may only be about releasing new material. Clearly, he is still willing to talk about the Carpenters legacy, which gives me hope for him doing something for the 50th. I've seen complaints online over the years about how Richard seemed rather unemotional during the 80s when discussing Karen, but it seems to me that with every interview he gives as the years pass you can see and hear the pain of her loss even more keenly. Usually its the other way around. I think that speaks volumes about Richard and about Karen as a person and their relationship (those who are close to their siblings will know what I'm talking about. In addition, when you hear people who knew her like John Bettis, Paul Williams, Petula Clark, Joe Osbourne, Hal Blaine, Frankie Chavez, Herb and Jerry and even the guys from Klatuu with their signed Passage album from KC and RC, speak about her, its as if she hasn't really been gone for over three decades, but it was "only yesterday" (if you pardon the pun). That's the sign of a strong indelible "star" personality.
I did like they didn't harp on the disease, even though it had to come up (along with the Sue Lawley interview) just to tell the story, and thought the editing talking about her death while a young and healthy (Bob Hope Show) Karen sings "A Song for You" was well done.
Sometimes I get a little upset in these documentaries when they always have to open it telling us how brilliant RC is and how he created the Carpenters sound and how he made the Carpenters happen (as if we didn't know), and then I realize they have to do that because they are going to spend the next hour literally gushing over Karen Carpenter. In a way I think Herb and Jerry were right that it was a shame that Karen "never realized how great she was" but on the other hand I wonder if back in 1982 (before her passing) people around her or in the music industry or media, understood that either. It's only now when we see the influence of her voice on other singers and the impossibility of re-creating the Carpenters "sound" without her, that we get it. When Richard says at the end that Karen was "a really good person, a very nice person, and just so incredibly gifted, and even though she lived only 32 years, her voice will live forever", I have to think she (and anyone else) would be pleased. That's a heck of an epitaph.