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I love watching programmes about my favourite bands, even if they always seem to contain the same anecdotes and journalists. Basically nostalgic accounts of how Morrisey and Marr or others met, told again and again by people like John Harris, Stuart Maconie and Paul Morely. However, there is a certain technique employed in many documentaries of this type that stirs something vitriolic within me.

Super-imposing images of politicians, current affairs, world events and the like, over the music of a band on which a documentary focuses is provocative and effective, but false. I’ve seen this done many times. One example I can remember is an Arena documentary about Bob Marley. In it was featured the lyrics of some of Bob Marley’s songs scrolling down the screen, against a back drop of events that were to happen during or after his lifetime. It reached a hilarious and infuriating zenith when the lyrics of “Waiting in Vain” (on the more optimistic second side of his album Exodus), ascended to the top of the screen against a back drop of forests being demolished, much alike the manner in which the opening text of a Star Wars film, (“In a Galaxy far, far away”), does, minus the forests. In no way am I opposed to the environmental cause, but what has George Lucas-like editing and Bob Marley’s romantic offering got to do with carbon emissions, IKEA furniture made out of the Amazon forest and not leaving the standby button on, on your telly?

Recently, I watched a documentary on the Smiths, (I’m a student, and a clichéd one at that), and the same trend emerged. Flashed throughout the documentary were political images of the 1980’s, all shining brightly, or not so brightly in the case of Margaret Thatcher’s teeth, (again, I’m a student, and a clichéd one at that), accompanied by Morrissey wailing and Marr picking. To my mind, most of The Smiths' tunes were written firmly within the walls of Morrissey’s head, and had little to do with life in Westminster. Quite how his internal wranglings had anything to do with the internal wranglings of the far left Labour party of the 1980’s, I do not know.

I accept that in a documentary about a band it’s important to set the scene in which they emerged, but why does it have to be done so suggestively? Artists' lyrics emblazoned across images of political events suggests some sort of relationship between the two that a lot of the time simply wasn’t there. I don’t remember Morrissey writing a song called “Kinnock in a coma” or Marley penning “No forest no oxygen resulting in higher levels of CO2”. This false relationship between the artist and their political surroundings also adds to the notion that every single arena of life, (like the Smiths and Thatcher), within a decade can somehow be thrown together and made into a neat and cuddly, (the 1990’s), or dark and traumatic, ( the 1980’s), segment of your memory, much like Ferbies or Pokémon or your third birthday party in which you got the wrong presents so you climbed into your bed and listened to “How Soon Is Now?”. Ok, maybe not. Honestly, I didn’t.

All the same, Morrissey and the Trade Union Congress in which Kinnock fought against the more radical elements of the Labour Party... Marley and deforestation... Really?

And if it's artistic value you want to retain whilst informing the audience of the social setting of a band, why not hire Simon Schama for a monologue about the tough Thatcherite policies sung to the tune of ‘The Headmaster Ritual’? Or David Starkey singing about Neil Kinnock to the tune of ‘The Boy With A Thorn in His Side’? It would be marvellous.

Whatever the case, if in twenty years I see a documentary about the Libertines, with some of their lyrics up against images of ‘Blair’s Britain’, the War on Terror and Jade Goody, I think I’ll resign myself to defeat.

John Davies