Sometimes as a reporter you come across a story that makes your heart dance, as mine did this morning when I discovered that HBO, the channel behind The Wire, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are developing a series based on Anthony Kiedis's memoir, Scar Tissue.
A terrifyingly frank account of the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman's life, it begins with Kiedis moving from Michigan to Los Angeles to live with his father, a drug dealer to the Who and Led Zeppelin during the 1970s. The young Kiedis became his sidekick, hanging out at the Rainbow, and imbibing kid-size bumps before he even hit his teens. Cher was his babysitter. The most astonishing thing about the book is that it gets even more shocking as it goes on. However, the series will be a Wonder Years-style comedy focusing on his early life.
Kiedis spent years in the grip of addiction (though he doesn't sound like he regrets much of it) before emerging as a rehab bore (and didn't sobriety ruin his band?). And there are serious conversations to be had about responsible parenting and the glamorisation of substance abuse. But we won't be having those debates here. If the series is packed with half the rock'n'roll war stories, stranger-than-fiction anecdotes and crazed characters as the book, then it promises to be the next great US TV show, hinging on a surprisingly touching story of a father and son. The get out clause being that you know, eventually, there is a happy ending.
If that sounds shocking for US TV, then only a channel with as much intelligence and class as HBO could pull it off. Nobody has made a serious attempt to make a comedy about rock'n'roll since Spinal Tap, which is insane, seeing as rock'n'roll is the single most hilarious pursuit a human being can follow. Rock biopics tend to be stuffy affairs, either in such thrall to the subject that the storytelling goes out the window, or laying on the tragedy far too thick. Rock is funny, and the people who play it are funnier.
So who else do you think is ripe for similar treatment: a psychedelic Mighty Boosh-style saga about Jimi Hendrix? A Roseanne-style sitcom about the Ciccone family? Or, alternatively, an idea I've been trying to get off the ground for years: a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-style animated adventure series starring the Cribs (with Johnny Marr as their Master Splinter)?
