L.S. Lowry: The Unheard Tapes (BBC2)  

Rating:

What would Lowry paint today? Flat caps and headscarves have been replaced by TikTok hair and burqas...and, despite the fat jab revolution, today's 'matchstalk men' are more like beachball boys.

But if we think nostalgia is a thing of the past, so did the great Northern painter. His quavering voice, echoing on L.S. Lowry: The Unheard Tapes, complained: 'It's amazing how it's gone. This country was the most prosperous in the world, and now it's a wreck.'

That was 50 years ago, just a few weeks before the old curmudgeon's death in February 1976, aged 88, following a fall down the stairs at his home in the town outside Manchester where he was born.

The factory chimneys familiar from his paintings were already disappearing. Lowry despaired at watching his England vanish. Many of his best-loved scenes were painted in Pendlebury, about ten miles up the road from today's by-election in Gorton and Denton. It would all seem impossibly alien to him now.

But his pictures are still extraordinarily popular. They depict a world, like Coronation Street and EastEnders, that has gone but still exists in modern memory. His painting Going To The Match, which shows a crowd pouring into a football stadium, is both familiar and dated. It sold for £7.8 million in 2022.

That tension between yesterday and today made the tapes fascinating. They were brought alive by Sir Ian McKellen, speaking the lines in perfect synch as the original audio played. McKellen's timing on every growl, cough, tut and yawn was magnificent.

Annabel Smith played Angela, the researcher who interviewed him more than a dozen times in the 1970s, amassing a boxful of tapes that lay forgotten for decades before their rediscovery.

Angela was softly spoken and deferent, her questions rarely more than half a sentence long. But she was an instinctive interviewer, allowing her subject plenty of time to speak and challenging him gently when he tried to avoid answering.

'I never thought for a second of getting married,' he claimed. 'Very blameless past.'

When Angela pressed him, he announced, 'I've never been in love. I might have married a girl but she died in an epidemic.' 

That sounds like the lie of a confirmed bachelor.

He managed to disguise the fact that, far from being a professional artist all his life, he'd worked as a rent collector for more than 40 years.

But what he could not hide was how deeply he felt his parents' lack of affection, or their contempt for his art. When visitors came to the house, his mother would turn his paintings to the wall.

Too many contributions from talking heads such as radio DJ Stuart Maconie interrupted the flow. I wish we could have heard much more from Lowry himself.

Did Angela ever ask him, for instance, why he turned down a knighthood? What would we have called him: Sir LS? Sir Les?