From the Basement (Eagle Rock/Shock)

 “I don’t do fashion, I am fashion” said Coco Chanel, a few words reducing the fashion industry to its core elements: self aggrandisement, hysterical narcissism, wit, a thin grasp of grammatical construction and image obsession. It’s about living in an alternate reality and in an industry built on unchecked ego Anna Wintour is some sort of terrifying, figurehead. As editor of US Vogue, Wintour’s job remit is to organise lots of pretty pictures on pages so they look fabulous next to each other, yell at her staff and sit dispassionately in sunglasses at fashion shows whilst young designers throw themselves at her feet. It’s a uniformly vulgar display of obsequiousness, but that’s the business folks. 

The September Issue - directed by RJ Cutler, also responsible for the insidery The War Room which followed the Clinton campaign in its 1992 White House tilt - is in the same boat as last year’s doco about disgraced boxer Mike Tyson (Tyson). Whilst both films project impartiality, they are hagiographic apologias. In Tyson’s case it was a overcoming a charge sheet as long as it was violent. In Wintour’s case it’s reversing her well earned hard faced bitch reputation; in fact the doco seems like a reaction to the thinly veiled attack book/film about her, The Devil Wears Prada. So we get lots of footage demonstrating her considerable business acumen; we also get plenty of footage confirming her status as a style maker and a family scene or two to soften the edges. But we also get a glimpse into the beating heart of Vogue in Grace Coddington; ex-model and Wintour’s long-suffering offsider and only person strong enough to stand up to her severely-fringed  boss. It may be Wintour’s magazine – but Coddington is the star. She almost makes you forget how venal the fashion industry can be.

So here’s the deal. It’s 1970. Everyone’s really fucking high because in their mind Woodstock is still going or they’ve just come back from the real downer that was Altamont. On the one hand Black Sabbath released their genre-defining debut album – on the other the My Lai Massacre defined the worst excesses of military power. Elvis Presley made his live comeback and Paul McCartney officially dissolved the Beatles. Through it all a bunch of chimps dressed as secret agents, evil German henchmen, Mexican cowboys and Native Americans entertained all and sundry with hilariously plotted adventures that lead me beg the questions: (i) why? and (ii) no, seriously, why? The devil-may-care attitude of the era did throw up the occasional gem ( The Banana Splits and HR Pufnstuf, for example) but the sight of chimps donning hilarious Hitler moustaches, chimps masquerading as a groovy psychedelic band (The Evolution Revolution) or chimps rocking out the tweed’n’trilby combo is not only a struggle to take seriously – it’s frankly difficult to figure out what the hell is going on. The slim plots of each episode are built around the unpredictable antics of the ‘talent’ who were voice-overed by simians further up the evolutionary chain in post-production. It’s total ‘70s kitsch, apparently quite an expensive venture and I would normally recommend any absurdist, who-gives-a-shit TV show from any decade but Lancelot Link has be the worst case of chimpsloitation I’ve ever seen. And as my friends will readily tell you – I take chimpsloitation very seriously.