True Blues

Martin Scorsese shows his understanding of the roots of American music in No Direction Home and The Blues; the judges on The X Factor cruelly break hearts for public enjoyment; Karl Spain tries to find that special someone and the BBC's antique shows really take the medal. By Dermot Bolger

 When people stop me on the street – as they frequently do – to ask what I remember most from the 1978 Ballyshannon Folk Festival, I rarely mention the two car accidents I was involved in on my way there. Nor do I mention the appearance of the recently formed Stockton's Wing who blew the main act off the stage. What I recall is an elderly traditional musician walking on stage to look at the huge crowd in the tent and talk about the Donegal and Sligo fiddlers and pipers he had known in his youth. They were, in his opinion, finer musicians that he was, but they died without ever having the chance to play before such a crowd. All that remained of their music were scratchy field recordings made in remote kitchens where sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could hear a car engine left running in the yard to power the rudimentary recording equipment.
Collectors like Seamus Ennis crisscrossed Ireland to preserve this dying legacy by making such recordings for the BBC or the Irish Folklore Commission. I don't know what nicknames they were given by the elderly musicians they pursued, but their American counterparts who scoured the Mississippi Delta to collect the past before it disappeared were known as “Ballad Hunters”. They presumably hunted much of their prey in the same general areas as bounty hunters, because a few blues musicians, including Huddie Leadbetter, made their first recordings from behind prison bars.  
If Martin Scorsese deservedly won plaudits last week for No Direction Home, his two-part documentary on Dylan, he also showed his empathy for, and understanding of, the roots of American music, in The Blues (BBC2, Friday, 11.35pm), his brilliant homage to the delta blues. As one contemporary black musician said, journeying back into the swampy heartland of that extraordinary sound, “to know where you are going you have to know where you have been”. The Blues was a hymn to those black musicians who – like their Irish counterparts such as the wandering fiddler John Doherty in Donegal – kept the music alive from pure love, never knowing that it would be later be transmuted into new forms and reach mass audiences. But it was also a homage to the ballad hunters who sought out and nurtured superb and neglected singers.
It would be nice to credit the judges of The X Factor (UTV, 6.10pm & 8.10pm Saturday) with such laudable motives, but this exercise in manipulation and public cruelty is such a crass and ugly experience as to make the present reviewer feel dirty just by watching it. Admittedly its star-struck victims are not exactly press-ganged in off the street, or forced to take part in lieu of community service or a custodial sentence. Showbusiness is a cruel trade and the judges are merely making the choices always made in such a competitive industry. To perpetually wring every drop of emotion from the discarded (or further-toyed-with) contestants is cruel enough, but they seem such a talentless bunch, bereft of any originality, that perhaps the cruellest thing is not rejecting them but giving them hope.
Hope is a quality with which Karl Spain is truly blessed – along with a nice line in self-deprecatory humour. If there was an award for best self-explanatory programme title then Karl Spain Wants a Woman (RTÉ2, 10.30pm) would surely win it. This week an etiquette coach was brought in to advise Karl on his odyssey through the maze of the modern dating game. It's a field in which I must confess considerable rustiness, although I do recall that high among the do's and don'ts of a first date in my time was this rule – don't bring along a film crew to the restaurant. A bravery medal should be awarded to Mr Spain for burdening himself with this handicap in addition to being, by his own admission, not the most sculpted Adonis on the block. Karl Spain Wants a Woman has become a highly engaging series as Mr Spain grows in my affections and, one suspects, the affections of the females of our nation. In the lottery of love, he deserves at least to land a young widow with the grass of 60 cows.
The lottery of the auction world seems to have an endless fascination for the nosy viewers of the BBC, who can enjoy bidding for insignificant antique knick-knacks on both Flog It! (BBC2, 6pm, Monday to Friday) and – for people with weekend withdrawn symptoms – Cash in the Attic (BBC1, Sunday, 1.35pm). With the ever optimistic Paul Martin holding the hands of anxious vendors, Flog It! would run Karl Spain close on the self-explanatory title front, but watching the frenzied bidding that saw a schoolboy international golf medal change hands for £18 on Cash in the Attic brought a whole new meaning to the concept of low budget television.
Dermot Bolger's new novel is The Family on Paradise Pier.