Anarchy on the TV

ART There’s more to Edvard Munch than The Scream Page 54 →

DANNY BOYLE IS SITTING IN HIS KITCHEN sounding faintly surprised that his latest project has been made at all. “It’s so not the story that everybody wants to be told,” he says, “but it is the story that should be told.” Pistol, a six-part mini series, certainly isn’t the first drama about the Sex Pistols. There was Alex Cox’s 198 6 movie Sid and Nancy, as well as The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle – a game attempt by the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren to claim the whole thing was a brilliantly orchestrated money-making scheme. But Boyle’s is by far the most ambitious.

It is based on Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, Steve Jones’s fantastic, occasionally harrowing autobiography, which takes readers from the guitarist’s horrendous childhood (he was sexually abused by