As someone who has invested so much of his professional career in dismantling and examining the life and work of David Bowie, I find the seemingly exponential release of substandard rarities and entry-level biographies depressing. Enough already. Sometimes it seems as though Bowie’s corpse was left to rot on a piece of wasteland near Sundridge Park in Bromley, to be pecked away by a committee of increasingly low-brow culture vultures. Francis Whately, however, is neither vulture nor bottom feeder, and the three documentaries he directed about Bowie for the BBC will still be being watched and appreciated in a hundred years’ time. Five Years, Finding Fame and The Last Five Years are peerless, contextualising the star in ways both idiosyncratic and probing.
