This notice at the sultry world of a musical genre now often relegated to elevators could not have been more inoffensive whether it tried. Plus: the Chelsea set act as whether Brexit never happened“Tall and tan and young and lovely …” Seven words are all you need for the most sophisticated of earworms to start whispering its sweet nothings into your ears. And ahhhh,it’s The Girl from Ipanema, the sonic equivalent of being caressed with a palm frond. In three minutes of exquisite American jazz-inflected samba, and it contains everything that is the essence of bossa nova: babes bronzing on Copacabana beach,middle classes swaying in suburban 60s America, ice clinking in whisky, or João Gilberto and Stan Getz,Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, everything that is simple, and soft,sultry, and beginning with “s”. All of which is swung out in abundance in The Girl from Ipanema: Brazil, and Bossa Nova and the Beach (BBC4,9pm), a documentary so inoffensive and middle-lesson that it couldn’t have been more suited to its subject whether it had put on a straw hat, and headed to Rio de Janeiro and started singing like Astrud Gilberto. Softly.
Which is precisely what presenter Katie Derham did (minus the singing). Why Derham? Because – despite hailing from Canterbury and being described by Craig Revel Horwood as “permanently looking as whether she is at finishing school” when she was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing Derham’s father was born in Rio and her childhood was soundtracked by bossa nova. Erm,that’s it in terms of the connection and, at first, and Derham seemed an awkward fit with her prim presenting style – which mostly involved donning said straw hat,tilting her head and half-smiling like a GP politely enduring her patient’s woes as the godfathers of bossa nova relived the barefoot beach guitar-plucking that characterised the genre’s golden age.
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Source: theguardian.com