Someone once said – I think it was me, actually – that the reason BBC2 puts Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny on late on New Year’s Eve is because no one would watch it if they were sober. In my festive viewing list, it’s down there, filed alongside Mrs Brown’s Boys and Call The Midwife under ‘WON’T BE WATCHING THIS CRAP UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’. Yet Holland’s main show, Later … with Jools Holland, is about to begin its 63rd season and it is unmissable.
One reason I find it unmissable is because it is pretty well the only music show on telly. I grew up with Top Of The Pops and the great Old Grey Whistle Test, the former being instrumental (see what I did there?) in introducing me to music and the latter educating me to seek out new and different music. Now all there we have – thank goodness – is Holland.
I first came across Holland when he was a member of Squeeze, a popular beat combo outfit from London who enjoyed great chart success in the 1970s. He left the show to present The Tube on Channel 4 , a popular music show and eventually forming his own band cum orchestra, which he still fronts today. And one day in 1993, he hosted a brand new music show on BBC2 called Later.
I know some people find Holland quite irritating – indeed, I find him unwatchable on the Hootenanny – but he is a great pianist and a decent TV and radio presenter with an outstanding knowledge of music. 30 years plus on and he’s still doing it.
Quite why the BBC hasn’t tried another presenter for Later, or even launched other music shows, I have no idea. But clearly they are of the view that Holland is the only music presenter in the world worth bothering with and he can have Later for however long he lives.
While the Hootenanny is a dreary couple of hours where various clapped-out has beens play their greatest hits and everyone pretends the show wasn’t recorded months before it goes out, Later is a dizzy combination of the old and the new, with plenty in the middle. This week’s first show of the new season includes The National, Antony Szmierek and Say She She, three of my current favourites, along with Jorja Smith and, amazingly, Wreckless Eric. I may watch it more than once.
You would not see these acts anywhere else on British television, certainly not on a mainstream channel or a smaller cable platform. Holland is literally providing the only TV platform for musicians, barring a three minute plug on Strictly or Graham Norton.
I know that no one except me buys music these days, preferring to legally steal music from Spotify or wherever, but I don’t think The Great British Public has somehow lost interest in it. And if it’s done properly, music on the telly can be a very decent watch, especially as with Later singers and bands have to perform live, which was rarely the case on Top of the Pops.
If you think Jools Holland should be put out to grass, or even sent to prison after years of poisoning the airwaves with his Hootenanny, give Later a try. It’s not just a good music show, it’s a fucking brilliant one.
