SUNDAY DECEMBER 4
ABBA: THE MISSING 40 YEARS
TVNZ 1, 7.30pm
Last year’s reunion album, , sold over 2.5 million copies and earned Grammy nominations, and the Abbaavatar show in London is booked up until the end of next year. Clearly, there’s been some pent-up demand for Sweden’s greatest pop group, something that this UK doco, which was originally broadcast when the album was released in September last year, tapped into. Like many Abba docos before it, it’s basically a mix of archive trawl and talking heads without any involvement from the band. It looks at the life and careers and , and for Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, solo careers that never really took flight and lives marked by tragedy. That all gets a tidy recap as well as an examination of why the group’s music never went away.