The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill

…but must her celebrity fans be so pretentious?
Ben-Felsenberg-176Brace yourself for a flood of Olympic-class pretension in The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill (BBC Four, Friday, 9.10pm) – enough to fill up Pseuds Corner in Private Eye for a year. For they do lay it on thick, these celebrity Kate Bush fans, with their talk of ‘sonic sculpture’, claiming – quite straight-faced – that her voice embraces ‘every facet of human experience’ and even taking the musical adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses in her 1989 album The Sensual World absolutely seriously. You’ll find Steve Coogan, Tori Amos and Stephen Fry in the wide-eyed adulation corner, but refreshingly there’s also room for quibbles to ensure we’re not quite watching an unadulterated hagiography.

Why, Suede singer Brett Anderson even has the licence to voice his view that Bush’s penchant for leotard-clad prancing about in her early videos is ‘all a bit am-dram’. And it’s true, from the Wuthering Heights single that took the teen prodigy to the top of the charts in 1978, through Babooshka and Wow and the other early songs, there’s a naivety (albeit a winning naivety) born out of a suburbanite’s excitement at discovering the avant-garde.

After an irresistible peak with Hounds Of Love in the mid- 1980s, the infectious pop brio has been removed and only the devotees are left to listen to the abstruse banshee warblings. But there are plenty of those hardcore fans – and in some quarters Bush’s first tour in 35 years is being greeted as an historic event. The second coming, if you were wondering, begins on Tuesday at the Hammersmith Apollo.

NOT TO BE MISSED

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Scotland Decides: Salmond Vs Darling BBC2, Mon, 8.30pm
It’s round two as the debate continues in the run-up to Scotland’s epochal referendum.

Under The Dome Mon, Channel 5, 10pm
Season two of Stephen King’s trashy but heartily entertaining story about a small town, Chester’s Mill, cut off from the outside world by a gigantic dome.

Hotel India Wed, BBC2, 8pm
A passage to India is now an experience of unparalleled luxury, if you stay at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace, where rooms cost your weight in rubies…