Sunday 29 May 2022 11:04 PM Danny Boyle's new series on the Sex Pistols, CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews trends now
Pistol (Disney+)
Rating: 
How Dame Vivienne Westwood survived the 1970s without repeatedly going bankrupt is a mystery.
The way director Danny Boyle tells it, in his punk biopic Pistol (Disney+), Westwood’s Chelsea store existed only to provide shoplifters with decent clobber to nick.
T-shirts with obscene logos, jackets dripping in safety pins and chains, bondage trousers: they all practically walked out of the door on their own. And if Viv did catch a thief, he’d probably end up in one of boyfriend Malcolm McLaren’s bands.
Scene-stealing: Anson Boon as Johnny Rotten Pictured (L-R): Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious, Anson Boon as John Lyndon, Toby Wallace as Steve Jones
Pistol revels in its luridly romantic history. Every petty crime and drug-fuelled escapade acquires legendary status in this retelling of Sex Pistol Steve Jones’s memoirs.
Toby Wallace plays Jones as a chirpy Cockney, a wide boy nicknamed ‘the Artful Dodger’. His quick wit and charisma are his only compensation for a wretched childhood, steeped in abuse.
The first time we see him, he’s breaking in to the Hammersmith Odeon after David Bowie’s farewell gig as Ziggy Stardust in 1973 – not to see the Spiders From Mars but to steal their gear. Then he and pal Paul Cook hotwire a sports car, neck a load of beer and uppers, and take the rozzers on a high-speed chase.
If all that lairy slang sounds a bit fake, so does the script. It was apparently written by someone who learned English by watching episodes of The Sweeney.
The Sex Pistols (L-R): John Joseph Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, drummer Paul Cook, bass guitarist Sid Vicious, born John Simon Ritchie, and guitarist Steve Jones, members of punk group the Sex Pistols
This is a working-class version of Richard Curtis’s London. Instead of Hugh Grant’s floppy fringe we have Johnny Rotten’s spiked barnet. Instead of Love Actually, this is Hate Actually.
But that doesn’t matter, because Pistol isn’t aimed at anyone who actually remembers London in the decrepit era of Harold Wilson’s government.
This is music history reimagined for the American market. Disney+ had a colossal success last year with Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Beatles documentary, Get
