All You Need Is Love review: a glorious reminder of how pop docs used to be

Stuffed with amazing footage, this magisterial history of pop – partly narrated by Liberace, partly written by Stephen Sondheim – got more than a little help from John Lennon’s contacts book

The subheading to this 17-part documentary says it all: The History of Popular Music. It shows what a massive undertaking this was, a seemingly impossible task. The fact that it succeeds so gloriously is, in large part, down to its director, Tony Palmer, who treated something as ephemeral as pop with a seriousness it probably didn’t deserve. That would certainly have been the opinion of most people working in the arts at the time – 1977 – but Palmer had by then already given us such classic documentaries as Bird on a Wire, about Leonard Cohen, and 200 Motels, co-created with Frank Zappa.

The result is quite simply stuffed with amazing footage, touching on everything from gospel, vaudeville, ragtime and musicals to protest songs, country, R&B, swing and acid rock. Palmer makes excellent choices in collaborators, with Liberace narrating the episode about vaudeville and Stephen Sondheim scripting the one about musicals. And he picked a good time to make his history: Elvis was still alive and so, therefore, was rock’n’roll; John Lennon, too, something that had practical benefits, as the Beatle was a longtime champion of Palmer’s, always willing to open his address book and make introductions – or beg favours – on his behalf.