LIVE AID at 40: When rock ’n’ roll took on the world (BBC iPlayer, three episodes, released 6 July) follows the endeavours of Band Aid, Live Aid, and Live 8 to raise much needed funds for famine relief and to reshape the politics of giving.
After 40 years of celebrities’ using their platforms to do nothing but highlight popular causes and their own politics, we can miss how radical Band Aid and Live Aid were at the time. Charity concerts have been organised many times since then, but, in 1985, when Bob Geldof decided to gather a bunch of musicians together to collaborate on a series of all-day, transatlantic concerts, nobody had attempted anything like it before.
The bold momentum of the endeavour and its wing-and-a-prayer nature make it hard to imagine it happening in today’s litigious world of red tape and bureaucracy. The speed and scale were remarkable: Geldof had the idea for the concerts in the middle of June and launched it to the world’s media almost immediately (amazingly, announcing the involvement of some acts, such as the Who, before even asking them). It took place just weeks later, on 13 July.
Over the 40 years since the concert, Live Aid has raised more than £114 million. While retrospective criticism of the manner in which this happened is natural, it is perhaps unfair to apply a 2025 understanding of socio-political ethics to 1985. As the great Sir Lenny Henry says in the documentary, Live Aid was a very human response to human suffering on a colossal scale. It wasn’t perfect, but thank God they did something.
Trainwreck: The real ‘Project X’ (Netflix, 8 July) is a documentary series exploring modern events that hit the headlines because they were chaotic. This week’s episode featured the story of Merthe, who, in 2012, was a normal teenager hoping to throw an ordinary party for her 16th birthday. What happened was a spiralling disaster of such epic proportions that it defied reality. It culminated in 350,000 people being invited and a full-scale riot.
This is the story of the real Project X: a reference to the 2012 film about an American teenager’s house party that gets — criminally — out of hand, after the invitation is extended widely. The real action takes place in the quiet, leafy village of Harla, in the Netherlands. The dramatic irony is palpable, as young Merthe clicks “public” on her Facebook party invite, and chaos and entropy unfolds.
There is much to chew over here, from the anarchic behaviour of youth to the stampeding-buffalo mentality of rioting crowds; but the thing that struck me most was how frightening and uncontainable social-media virility is. It’s a beast; and we’ve still not found the means to control it.