5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
TV review: Live Aid docuseries paints Geldof as the good guy
The 1985 Live Aid concert was a historic gesture of international solidarity by the music industry — a business not generally known for its generosity or humanity.
But it is also the story of a group of Irishmen haunted, as Bono says, by the 'folk memory' of our own famine and a trauma passed down the generations.
Bono makes his comment early in Live Aid at 40: When Rock'n'Roll Took on the World (BBC Two, Sunday), a fascinating three-part documentary about the original shows at Wembley and Philadelphia, the 1984 Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas? and Live Eight, the damp squib follow-up charity circus from 2005.
The lead character is another Dubliner, Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof. He comes across well in this film — a flawed yet sincere campaigner outraged by BBC news footage of children starving to death in Ethiopia in 1984.
A clumsier doc would lean into revisionism and accuse Live Aid and Geldof of a white saviour complex. Live Aid at 40 resists that temptation and gives Geldof his due as a passionate campaigner.
There are criticisms, however. Journalist Kolton Lee points out that the Live Aid Wembley bill was all white, and that the many black artists in Britain at the time were given short shrift.
Geldof's response comes from a place of arch-pragmatism. The goal, he says, was to raise money for those dying in Ethiopia.
He needed big stars, and because of the way the business operated at that time, those stars were all white. Had there been a Stormzy at that time, he would have begged him to be involved. But there wasn't.
The BBC also does well in giving a voice to Ethiopians. Many were upset by the line 'Do they know it's Christmas' from Band Aid.
Ethiopia had been at the nexus of ancient Christianity — how insulting to suggest that Christmas was an alien concept, says Ethiopia's then aid minister Dawit Giorgis. 'Ethiopians are the oldest Christians in the world so that offended us.'
There is some unexpected humour. Bono recalls visiting the White House to meet George W Bush — only to be mistaken for Cher's ex, Sonny Bono, long dead at the time.
It is a rare chuckle in an often sobering series which ultimately stands as a warts-and-all celebration of Geldof and his remarkable achievement in transforming something as trivial as pop music into an instrument that saved millions of lives.
