LAST NIGHT: Review of Oasis - Right Here Right Now

The best bit of music played in Oasis - Right Here Right Now (BBC1) was the opening burst of Thin Lizzie, used to announce the fact that the boys were back in town. It seemed mildly perverse to begin a film about one band by playing another band's hit, but perhaps Mike Connolly, the director, simply couldn't resist the song cue offered by Liam's cocky: "Right, move over - the big boys are back". Or perhaps I'm just getting on a bit. This thought is rather depressing - I was sure I had good few years in me yet before I found myself sitting in front of a rock documentary thinking "What a pair of sullen louts". Still, I won't send off for the Saga brochure just yet. The longer you watched this undisguised promo for the band's third album, the more the evidence mounted that such a response wasn't necessarily age-related. Take Noel's gracious position on the great confraternity of music, for example: "We want to blow out every other band into oblivion... we still want to eclipse every single musician in this country. Because we want to, because we can, because we're the best." Is this ambition or just adolescent bragging? Or consider his subtle analysis of the band's popularity: "We are like the majority of people in this country... and we're still outspoken and we still don't give a shit." Is that surly national portrait actually true, or merely a generalisation of a private aggression?

The rather dreary effect of the film's undeviating upward gaze wasn't greatly helped by the dullness of what the Gallagher brothers had to say - by which I mean both the obviousness of content and the poverty of expression. Trying to sum up his feelings about playing at Maine Road, home ground of his beloved Manchester City, Noel said "that is actu... I mean, you know when you sit down and think about things like that... it's... phwerr... you know...." The band's nicknames weren't a great advert for their powers of intellect either. Paul Arthur, who has closely cropped hair, is called "Bonehead", and Paul McGuigan has to settle for the even more desultory "Guigsy". It wasn't particularly surprising to find that football would have been Noel's alternative career choice. The film picked up a little bit when it accompanied the Gallaghers on a drive through their old Manchester neighbourhood, an unintentionally funny vision of the artists as young men ("That Co-op is where I first got caught shoplifting", "Eddie Yates off Coronation Street opened that chippie"). But the momentary lift this gave the film couldn't cancel out the gloom left by Liam's embattled sense of persecution. "Until the day you die there's always going to be someone who thinks you're a dick," he had declared earlier. The film depicted him and his brother as without wit, without grace and without much invention either - so at least we know now why the music sounds like it does. (Please address all letters of complaint to I Feel Sorry For You, You Sad Old Git, c/o The Independent).

The BBC has been in an unusually self-congratulatory mood lately, mostly because self-congratulation is such a useful pretext for a raid on the archives. Old programmes used to be called "repeats" or occasionally, if the network was feeling bold, "classics", but now they are lightly chopped and represented as "selection boxes" (as in a recent series of sitcom gobbets introduced by B-list celebrities) or "affectionate reviews" (as in last night's compendium of Dick Emery gags). TW Time Machine (BBC1) is a similar exploitation of the back catalogue - though its nostalgia is given an extra pertinence by the fact that we are looking back at looking forward (the archive clips mostly offer yesterday's version of today's world). It's pretty unambitious about what might be done with the contrasts, but it does include a cherishable feature called Raymond Baxter's Rock 'n' Roll Years - interesting, not so much for its clips of useless inventions, as for the sublime non-sequiturs of the connecting links. "Annie Lennox with one of the hits of the year," he enunciated yesterday, in a voice like a Spitfire fly-past. "But even she might have asked `Why?' about our final item."