Parky at the Pictures (18/9/2014)

The catalyst was Dutch-born coach Thomas Rongen, who had failed to make the grade as a player at Ajax and had kicked around the North American Soccer League before opting for the dugout. During the course of a chequered career, Rongen had managed to alienate players or administrators everywhere he went. But he had enjoyed a modicum of success with the US Under-20s team in the early 2000s, the very time that American Samoan football hit rock bottom.

During the qualifiers for the 2002 World Cup, the team had lost 13-0 to Fiji, 8-0 to Samoa and 5-0 to Tonga. But, on 11 April 2001, American Samoa had been thrashed 31-0 by Australia, with seven different players making the score sheet as Archie Thompson bagged 13 goals and David Zdrilic netted another eight. The unfortunate goalkeeper that night was Nicky Salapu, who managed to concede a whopping 91 times in his eight World Cup games. But, rather than quitting after he relocated to Seattle, Salapu decided that the 2011 campaign was going to prove his salvation and he was welcomed back by his team-mates with open arms.

Even though the five islands making up the country are only inhabited by 55,000 people, there were also some new faces in the squad, including the American-born pair of Rawlston Masaniai and Justin Manao who were eligible because of their family connections. However, the media attention fell primarily on Jaiyah Saelua, who, despite being born male, lives as a woman and identifies herself with Samoa's third gender, the Fa'afafine. Accepted unquestioningly and with laudable respect by captain Liatama Amisone, Jr. (who teaches maths at the local school) and like teammates serving US soldier Ramin `The Machine' Ott, Saelua quickly proved herself to be a tough-tackling defender whose indomitable spirit was exactly what Rongen was seeking to instil into his charges.

As much a drill sergeant as a coach, Rongen spends the majority of his training sessions bawling at players who are often exhausted from a full day's work and lack the basic skill to master what he asks of them. But the martinet also has a soft side, as wife Gail reveals that Rongen accepted this assignment from the US Soccer Federation to honour the memory of his 19 year-old step-daughter, Nicole Megaloudis, who had been killed in a car crash seven years earlier. But standing in the way of the elusive victory were Samoa, the Cook Islands and Tonga.

Renowned for their commercials for brands like Nike and Adidas, the debuting British duo of Jamison and Brett must have thought all their Christmases had come at once when this project fell into their laps. Everybody loves an underdog story. However, this one not only has some tragedy and discrimination to enhance the hard luck factor, but it also has several characters genuinely worth rooting for. And, the locations weren't too shabby, either.

Most people will already know the outcome of matches that took place three years ago. But, as with the `No Hiding Place' episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, in which Terry (James Bolam) and Bob (Rodney Bewes) try to avoid finding out the result of the England-Bulgaria game until the highlights are shown on television, the film works best if you don't know the scores in advance. Roger Goula's shamelessly sentimental score spoils things a little bit. But Jamison and Brett demonstrate a sure visual touch in operating their own digital cameras and they are ably helped to ramp up the suspense by editor Julian Quantrill.

A worthy idea is rather curiously handled in Marc Silver's Who Is Dayani Cristal?, a blend of investigation and reconstruction that awkwardly seeks to offer a real-life insight into the perils and travails exposed in such fictional migration sagas as Cary Joji Fukunaga's Sin Nombre (2009) and Diego Quemada-Diez's The Golden Dream (2013). The purely factual aspects are soberly presented and raise plenty of pertinent issues. But the segments involving Mexican actor Gael García Bernal following the route to El Norte from Honduras feels studied, didactic and self-conscious and distracts from the central storyline and the lessons it has to impart.

Dismayed by the numbers of migrants found dead in the Sonora Desert, documentarist Marc Silver travelled to Pima County in Arizona and was given unprecedented access to the US agencies charged with recovering and identifying corpses, as well as the Latin American delegations responsible for tracing and informing expectant relations. The discovery of a man with no papers, but the words `Dayani' and `Cristal' tattooed on his torso prompted Silver to focus on his case. But such was the lack of clues that forensic scientists were forced to sever his hands and rehydrate them in the hope of obtaining workable fingerprints.

Eventually, the deceased was identified as 29 year-old Honduran Dilcy Yohan Sandros Martínez and Silver interviews his widow, father mother, brother and friends in a bid to understand what drove him to leave such loving support in the hope of finding a better life in the United States. Unfortunately, Silver and screenwriter Mark Monroe keep asking the wrong questions, as they strive to string out the mystery by inter-cutting the revelations with footage of a scruffily attired Bernal heading through Honduras and Guatemala to Mexico in order to experience Yohan's last days.

Bernal mingles with men, women and children travelling more in desperation than expectation and shares their tales and rations with a humility that never quite disguises the fact that this is as much a job as a crusade and that he will be able to return to his luxurious lifestyle once the cameras stop rolling. There is something despicably patronising about this approach, especially when Bernal mounts the roof of La Bestia, as his doubtlessly well-intentioned action unthinkingly reduces the train that crawls through Mexico bringing hopefuls inchingly closer to the Promised Land to something akin to a theme park ride.

Colluding with co-cinematographer Pau Esteve Birba to put a disarming gloss on the visuals, Silver further enervates what should have been a deeply moving study by swathing it in Leonardo Heiblum and Jacobo Lieberman's mawkish score. The moment we learn that Yohan risked his life to help his two-year old son fight leukaemia should have been unbearable. But our senses have been blunted to the point that even the hideous statistic that over 200 bodies were found in this so-called `Corridor of Death' in 2010 doesn't crush us in the way it should.

The anguish on the faces of the cops, civil servants, doctors and diplomats earnestly trying to stem the tide of a catastrophe also fails to resonate sufficiently. Perhaps Silver might have been better advised to make three films instead of trying to weave the strands into a single thread. His and Bernal's sincerity can not be doubted. But their cumbersome methodology and muddled moralising leaves too many questions unanswered.

A Celtic musical flavour pervades American Interior, which reunites Welsh film-maker Dylan Goch and Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys for a second New World odyssey after their splendid 2010 road-doc, Separado! Moving north and backwards in time from 19th-century Patagonia to the Mississippi-Missouri heartland in the 1790s, this may lose its way in places and strike the odd artful pose. But the songs are catchy and clever and the mumbling Rhys makes a genial travelling companion, as he follows in the footsteps of his intrepid ancestor, John Evans.

According to legend, Prince Madoc discovered the Americas in 1170 and members of his expedition spawned a Welsh-speaking tribe when they interbred with the Native Americans of the Great Plains. In 1792, 22 year-old John Evans, a farmhand from Waunfawr in Snowdonia, was convinced by the poet Iolo Morgannwg to find the Padoucas or Madogwys and he set out on an epic journey that distant descendant Gruff Rhys decided to retrace after coming across Evans's map in the Beineke Library at Yale. However, Rhys also plans to use his quest to play a few gigs, while examining how myths are formed and distorted and showing how well-meaning enterprises can often have unforeseen cultural and colonial consequences.

Having visited the cottage where Evans grew up, Rhys meets with Ffionn Mair Jones at the National Library in Aberystwyth to learn more about his background. He also consults psychiatrist Ceri Gwynfryn Evans to see why he would have undertaken such a risky voyage and dramatist Gareth Miles to discover how Welsh Jacobins based in London paid Evans's passage in the hope that he could furnish them with some potentially seditious propaganda. Rhys also commissions artist Peter Fowler to create a three-foot felt effigy of Evans, which he will use en route to recreate many a moment of historical significance.

Landing in Baltimore, Rhys opens the first of his intimate shows (which combine music, powerpoint presentations and wry commentary) with a clip from a TV film by fabled Welsh historian Gwyn Williams recapping the Madoc myth. Goch intercuts this with a montage from the musivid to the `American Interior' ditty that will serve throughout as a linking device and reinforce the idea of how alone Evans was for much of his trip. Indeed, he was so grateful for the friendship of landlord Samuel Jones in Philadelphia that he abandoned his Methodist faith to become a Baptist. But brotherly love seems the least of Rhys's concerns as he puts the Evans puppet on his shoulders and runs up the steps that Sylvester Stallone climbed in Rocky (1976).

Having acquired some useful skills during a short spell as a surveyor, Evans departed for Rio Grande in Kentucky. Hot on his trail, Rhys fetches up in Cincinnati, where fans relish the chance to celebrate their Welsh heritage and hear new songs in development. He learns that Evans was persuaded to take Spanish citizenship here by one General Wilkinson, a double agent who sent him along the Ohio River to its confluence with the Mississippi at New Madrid. Here, Rhys meets local historians Martha Hunt and Virginia Carlson, who inform him that Don Juan Evans contracted malaria in the swamps and was lucky to survive. But, although his puppet endures some hallucinations, the real-life Evans was keen to press on, even though the next stage of his trek would take him through 2000 miles of terrain belonging to 12 hostile tribes.

In his TV programme, Gwyn Williams had suggested that Evans was driven on by a kind of madness, but he reached St Louis in 1795, where he was promptly arrested as a spy. Goch recreates the moment by having a local cop slap handcuffs on the puppet (whose face is pixillated to protect its anonymity) and Rhys joins historian Carolyn Gilman in visiting the site of the gaol, which is now occupied by a multi-storey car park. She explains how Spain still claimed much of the territory to the west, even though it was largely unexplored, and why, following his release from prison, Evans's willingness to sally forth in name of the Spanish monarchy probably led to him being accepted into polite society.

Rhys repays the kindness shown to his ancestor by serenading an enraptured audience outside the theatre, although the host of a local radio chat show looks less enamoured as his guest starts to explain the reason for his tour. By all accounts, the Spanish appointed Evans second in command to Scot James Santiago McKay, who was dispatched to find a north-west passage with a party that was mostly comprised of French fur trappers. On reaching Columbia, Rhys hooks up with Kliph Scurlock, the drummer of The Flaming Lips, who goes into the studio with him in Omaha to lay down the `American Interior' track.

Rhys presses on alone to see where Chief Blackbird of the Umo Ho Nation detained the explorers and only agreed to free them when they accepted terms that included mapping the Missouri Basin to the Pacific, expelling British intruders and capturing a unicorn. Sporting a wolf headdress, Rhys carries the Evans puppet on his shoulders to a rendezvous with river dweller Matthew Batten, who explains how he quit the rat race to commune with nature. He commends Evans for venturing into the unknown against the current and Goch uses animation to show how he was chased by the Lakota Sioux and captured by the Arikara tribe, who let him go because they were so enchanted by the Welsh language that he became known as `the Man with the Golden Tongue'.

On reaching the lands of the Mandan Nation, Rhys meets with tribal preservation officer Calvin Grinnell and park ranger John Moeykens before flautist Keith Bear explains how the tribe helped Evans survive a rough winter in their earth lodges. As an agricultural people, the Mandan had crops and culture and historian Marilyn Hudson reveals how they also traded with the British and the Spanish for guns and horses. But Evans was a wanted man and the Canadians sent an agent to assassinate him. However, he fled when Evans challenged him to a duel and he was left to survey the region and play a key role in the establishment of the 49th Parallel between Canada and the United States.

A comical sequence has the puppet raising and lowering Spanish and British flags before Rhys visits a local school to tell the pupils about his trip. A song goes down better than his history lesson, but a teacher notes the similarities between Welsh and disappearing First American languages. So, Rhys goes to Twin Buttes to meet 82 year-old Edwin Benson, the last fluent speaker of Mandan, and his sole student, Cory Spotted Bear. He shows Rhys how to ice fish and, as they sit in a small tent erected over a hole in the frozen lake, the pair discuss how languages evolve and swap amusing stories about the naming of iPods and microwaves. Cory recalls having his mouth washed out with soap when he made an English pronunciation error. He also laments the effect that oil refining and fracking are having on the environment.

Although he likes the dragon on the flag, Edwin has never heard of Wales and Rhys reveals how he grew up speaking Welsh and picked up English from Sesame Street on the television. This perhaps explain the Muppet-like appearance of the Evans doll, which is shown scouring the plains, as Rhys learns from Keith Bear that Evans gave up his search for the Madogwys after nine months of fruitless inquiry among the neighbouring tribes. Eventually, he was summoned to New Orleans by the Spanish governor and placed under house arrest in 1798. As bluesmen sing about his exploits, Rhys learns that Evans was forced to admit his failure in a letter home. However, his findings were rejected and he was branded a failure before he died of yellow fever at the age of 29 in May 1799.

Guide Kelley Todd Edmiston escorts Rhys through the graveyard where her mother had watched the filming of LSD scene for Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969). She admits no one knows where Evans is buried, but they visit the Protestant section and Edmiston speculates that his spirit may be inhabiting a nearby cypress-oak tree. She tells Rhys that her mother was a voodoo priestess and, in dismissing movie hokum about the religion, she suggests that he treats the puppet in the same way that a fetish would be handled in order to make a connection with the beyond.

Goch indulges himself here by having cinematographer Ryan Owen Eddleston wobble his camera to create a dislocatory effect that he enhances with a digital paintbox to colour a twirling umbrella purple (one of several instances of highlights being used to decorate the glossy digital monochrome imagery). A similar demob-happiness afflicts Rhys, as he asks his next audience to applaud a new song as though it was an old favourite. But an air of solemnity descends when George Miles from the Yale Collection of Western Americana suggests that Evans's feat was akin to travelling into space. He also claims that his map proved vital to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their push to the Pacific. But academic Dafydd Rhys puts a dark spin on proceedings at the end of the pilgrimage by averring that Evans's failure to find a Welsh-speaking utopia did much to expose native tribes to the marauders who would eventually subjugate and eliminate them.

Anthropologist W. Raymond Wood likes the romantic notion that Evans died of a broken heart and Rhys asks if he can take back some stones from the graveyard to use in the extension that is being built at Evans's childhood home near Caernarfon. Edmiston helps him select some pebbles and shells and suggests that he performs a voodoo ceremonial to instal the puppet in its own shrine as a mark of respect. So, Rhys returns to Wales and, donning his wolf headdress one last time, he has the felt Evans carried on a palanquin behind some singing children and a brass band playing a New Orleans jazz lament. Somehow, it seems a fitting welcome-cum-farewell for a hero who has never quite got his due.

Recreating the playful mood of Separado!, this may seem a mite less fresh in purely stylistic terms, while the odd directorial flourish feels a touch de trop. But Goch and Rhys make a decent team and this feels more substantial and better planned out than its predecessor. The film is part of a package that also includes an app, an album and a book, but these will all miss the mumblecore deadpan of Rhys's stage patter and the deft way in which Goch both exploits the changing landscape and captures the differing ways in which Rhys is greeted by fans, academics and tribal representatives. But, even though the celebratory climax is charming, the genocidal consequence of Evans's anti-heroic exploits casts quite a pall.

By contrast, Charlie Paul fails to scratch the surface of an equally fascinating subject in For No Good Reason, a tribute to the life and art of Ralph Steadman that flits between archive footage, stylised animations by Kevin Rich and length sequences in the studio at Old Loose Court that involve Johnny Depp standing around in a big hat and smoking while his 77 year-old host searches for inspiration in the ink blots he has splattered on to a fresh sheet of cartridge paper. The sum of these parts is patchy in the extreme, as the viewer is left to piece together the fragments of biographical detail and discern what they can about Steadman's highly distinctive technique. Given some of the characters encountered along the way, this cannot be anything other than wackily entertaining. But Alex Gibney covered a sizeable part of the story in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2007) and Paul struggles to unearth the reason why such a seemingly mild-mannered man could have been responsible for some of the most ferocious images in cartoon history.

As Steadman welcomes Depp to Kent, it soon becomes clear that hard facts are to be at a premium, with the titles and dates of books being deemed immaterial to a tale of occasional excess and frequent excellence. Steadman claims that he knew he wanted to change the world the moment he learned to draw properly, but he has clearly continued to find this a frustrating process, as not only does the world not want to be changed, but he also has trouble satisfying his own high expectations (as he does here with an improvised picture of an unloved pet that he freely admits he doesn't much like).

He recalls going to America in 1970 and using his first book as a calling card. However, he quickly became embroiled in a project to produce 1000 pictures that exposed the plight of the homeless in New York City and his discovery that Skid Row was a museum of misery whose exhibits were invariably scorned by onlookers convinced him that his work had to have a crusading edge. The means to this end came out of the blue when Hunter S. Thompson invited Steadman to illustrate his report on the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine. In addition to abusing every substance they could get their hands on, the pair produced a savagely satirical assault on the patrons of Churchill Downs and accidentally invented gonzo journalism.

Having sketched his black Labrador, Steadman returns to his association with Thompson, who asked him to illustrate his 1971 book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. According to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, this became an instant literary classic and Steadman admits that the line drawings felt like something he had to get out of his system. He used to enjoy teasing Thompson that his contribution made the book. But their complementary eccentricity ensured its cult status and Depp is somewhat surprised to learn that Steadman was less of a drug hound than his friend and that they remained chalk and cheese, in spite of their enduring bond.

As if keen to change the subject, Steadman engages Depp in a discussion of the merits of India ink and explains how different effects can be achieved by flicking the wrists or using a brush or paint blower. He concedes a penchant for Francis Bacon's habit of letting chance take a hand in his work and praises Rembrandt for the `scintillating intellectual exercise' of chronicling the ageing process in his self-portraits. Depp looks on with suitable awe as Steadman employs masking fluid to add colour and uncover portions of the paper so that he can surprise himself by the outcome. As he stands back to admire his rather bizarre image of a startled man, Steadman reveals that his biggest influence is Picasso, as he lived to create and was never afraid to do so on his own terms.

As if to celebrate the benefits of random happenstance, Paul dispenses with chronological order in the next segment - while also overlooking the collaboration on Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973) - to recount Steadman and Thompson's antics surrounding the world heavyweight championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, the 1970 America's Cup and the 1980 Honolulu Marathon. In the ensuing jumble of anecdotage, it would seem that Steadman daubed `F*ck the Pope' on one of the competing yachts while Thompson peppered neighbouring craft with flares, Thompson sold the fight tickets and they had to watch the Rumble in the Jungle on television, and the pair sought to subvert the race in Hawaii by using a van to get ahead of the leading athletes and taunt them at the finishing line. As Depp chortles in admiration, Steadman shruggingly concedes they did these things for no good reason and, in the process, reinforced the bad name of gonzo.

Following a rather rambling reminiscence about Thompson bouncing ideas off a mistreated bird named Edward, Paul inflicts a montage of trademark illustrations whose savage subject matter is left unidentified as a rather twee song about favourite things plays on the soundtrack. Wenner opines that Steadman was often wilder than Thompson when it came to work and suggests that he overstepped the mark in his depiction of Nixon's America. Steadman readily admits that he used his wit as a weapon in this period. But he didn't always want to be on the attack, hence his decision to write the gardening column for Rolling Stone and his desire to distil the truth about Leonardo Da Vinci from the 50-odd books that had been written about him. Adopting a first-person perspective, I Leonardo (1983) sought to expose the man, as well as his art and his inventions. Steadman was delighted to discover that they had perfectionism in common and that Leonardo considered taking the trouble to get something right to be a prerequisite of genius.

Although Paul doesn't mention it, Steadman was born in Wallasey on the Wirral in 1936. He was raised in Abergele in North Wales and attended the local grammar, where he bowed his head during the 1947 school photograph as an act of rebellion against the detested headmaster, Dr Hubert Hughes. In many ways (as a montage of Ralph and Johnny hanging out fills the screen), Steadman has been biting back at authority ever since and he shows Depp his artwork for a booklet marking the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He reads from the terms, as another sappy song plays behind him, and he concludes that his targets have always been those who cheat and swindle the oppressed.

But he also regrets that his style has prevented him from being taken seriously as an artist. In order to rectify this, Paul quotes a Polaroid advertisement starring Laurence Olivier and invites Richard E. Grant to describe how Steadman manipulated the emulsion on Instamatic snaps to produce the grotesque images for the 1996 edition of his diaries, With Nails. Steadman recognises that the essence of his oeuvre is the distortion of reality and Terry Gilliam applauds him for retaining his anger with the world long after the rest of the 60s generation has lost its fire and venom.

Steadman reflects fondly on his brief association with William S. Burroughs and laments Thompson's decision to commit suicide in February 2005. Wenner claims that Steadman always wished that Thompson was a nicer man, but realised that the tension between them was vital to their working dynamic. A decade after his loss, Steadman still resents him for bailing out and removing the fun from his life, while there was still much to rant about. But he agrees with Depp that Thompson was always going to choose the method of his departure and it just happened to be blowing his brains out while on the phone to his wife Anita.

As a tribute, Steadman designed a memorial poster and he continues to sign limited edition prints to make a little money on the side. He complains that everything he has done has been meaningless and curses that he now helps pollute a world overloaded with information and imagery. But the pride he feels in his prolific output is readily evident and the lengthy closing montage of confrontational cartoons demonstrates the power and potency of his achievement.

Egged on by the somewhat superfluous Depp and his own desire to stake his claim in the New Journalism legend, Steadman proves a splendidly testy raconteur. He stands at his desk and chatters with a deceptive geniality, as bile drips from his stories as caustically as it does from his work. Realising he is capturing gonzo gold, Paul leaves him to it. But he also allows him to ramble in places and editor Joby Gee might have been a bit more ruthless with the scissors in some of the more stridently self-justifying passages.

However, audiovisual overload is very much the leitmotif of this hagiographical tract, which fatally lacks Steadman's knack for plucking the image juste from chaos. Skilled though the animation is, it often feels like an inessential embellishment designed to amuse those not quite convinced of Steadman's status, while the insistence on assuming that everyone watching is as familiar with his career as Paul and Depp means that countless specific and general references go unqualified. But the grossest miscalculation is the use of tracks by the likes of Slash, the All-American Rejects, Jason Mraz, James Blake, Ed Harcourt and Crystal Castles, which frequently have no bearing on the timeframes or material being considered on screen and almost without exception amount to noise pollution.

The quirk quotient is even higher in Steve Barker's Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie, which chronicles the chequered career of the UK's ultimate cult icon, John Otway. Hailing from Aylesbury, the sixtysomething sprite is the master of deprecatory self-promotion and the fact that he has survived so long on the fringes of the ruthless music industry is a testament to his own ingenuity and the loyalty of fans who buy into Otway's stunts with as much fervour as they do his songs. Fittingly, there is a gleeful homemade feel about this consistently amusing documentary. But don't be fooled by the persona. Otway is made of stern stuff and behind the seemingly haphazard chaos lurks a canny amount of calculation

The opening section suggests that Otway has never forgotten his roots, as footage of a 1978 performance of `Beware of the Flowers ('Cos I'm Sure They're Gonna Get You, Yeah!)' in front of 20,000 people at an outdoor gig in Aylesbury town centre is followed by a 2012 clip of him giving a talk at his old school about surviving in showbiz. Given that his own mother had misgivings about Otway pursuing a musical career when he merely had a modicum of talent, it's quite an achievement that he is still going strong 42 years after the release of the 1972 single `Misty Mountain'. But Otway had to wait until 1977 for chart success (well, No.27) when his madcap performance of `Really Free' with Wild Willy Barrett on The Old Grey Whistle Test caused a sensation after he crushed his testicles while falling off an amplifier.

According to A&R man Dennis Munday, Polydor signed Otway for £250,000 around the time the label landed The Jam for £6000. But, even though it was produced by The Who's Pete Townshend, the debut album John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett (1977) failed to sell in significant numbers and future collaborations Deep & Meaningless (1978), Way & Bar (1980) and The Wimp & The Wild (1989) did as poorly as the solo outings, Where Did I Go Right? (1979) and All Balls & No Willy (1982). The period did produce one showstopper for the duo's legendary live gigs, however, as Barrett used to smash Otway's skull into the microphone during `Headbutts' with such force that he was often left bleeding.

But the cherished second hit remained elusive, with punk audiences being left particularly cold by `Geneve', a 1977 love song backed by a 100-piece orchestra. Undaunted, Otway released three pressings of `Frightened and Scared' (1979) without vocals so that he could come to the homes of the `golden single' holders to croon live in their living rooms. But the gimmick failed to spark. He had more luck with the plan to hold gigs near to record shops whose returns contributed towards the charts and offer free admission to those carrying a copy of `DK 50/80' (1980). But, as Otway and Barrett snuck in at No.45, the Musician' Union called a strike the week they were due to appear on Top of the Pops and their hopes of nationwide exposure evaporated.

Looking back with sporting amusement, Otway recognises the silver lining of his situation, as his run of flops allowed him to publish the 1990 autobiography, Cor Baby, That's Really Me. He also realised the strength of his fan base, as promoter Paul Clerehugh and guitarist Richard Holgarth teamed up to make an event of Otway's 2000th gig at The Astoria on 12 November 1993. Suitably buoyed and typically unwilling to keep both feet firmly on the ground at once, Otway convinced himself he could fill the Royal Albert Hall and struggled during rehearsals to gel with the Aylesbury Youth Orchestra on Jean-Paul Mezgar's arrangement of `The Highwayman'. But it turned out all right on the night (30 October 1998), as 4000 die-hards came to cheer him on. As Ali Mclean reveals, the Otway Army also did its bit on National Poetry Day in 1999 when its members voted in such numbers that `Beware of the Flowers' figured at No.7 in a BBC poll to find the greatest pop lyrics of all time.

This show of force convinced Otway to take another tilt at the singles chart in 2002, with `Bunsen Burner', which had been inspired by his efforts to help his daughter with her chemistry homework. In spite of its sampled section from `Disco Inferno' by The Trammps, major retail outlets like Woolworths, Tesco, Asda and WH Smith refused to stock the record. Indeed, even when fans bought sufficient copies to propel it to No.9, Woolies inserted a title of their own choice in their in-store displays. John Morter was deeply impressed, however, and, in 2009, he copied the strategy employed by the Otway's Hit campaign to pit Rage Against the Machine against Simon Cowell in the race for the Christmas No.1.

Keen to mark his 50th birthday in style, Otway assembled 900 fans at Abbey Road Studios to record the single's B-side, a cover of `The House of the Rising Sun' that incorporated the audience participation chants that had become a feature of live shows. However, the euphoria clearly went to Otway's head and his decision to hire a plane to take 300 fans on `the greatest world tour ever' seemed doomed from the start. Nevertheless, he put down a £10,000 deposit on Sydney Opera House and persuaded the likes of Steve Harley and Glenn Tilbrook to come with him. But, while dates were also announced for New York, Las Vegas and Tahiti, the cost of the enterprise kept rising and, with the plane still only half full, Otway scrapped the tour and took a sizeable financial hit.

As his 60th birthday approached, Otway announced the production of a movie and raised the budget by selling advance tickets to the premiere at the Odeon in Leicester Square. On the morning of the screening on 7 October 2012, he shot a red carpet sequence that was cut into the picture and over 1000 devotees had the pleasure of seeing themselves named as co-producers in the closing crawl. It has taken a while for the film to secure a general release after playing selected dates and festivals across the country. But this feelgood rockdoc is well worth the wait. Keeping it simple and sticking to the facts, Otway makes an engagingly eccentric guide through the ups, downs and plateaux of a splendidly esoteric career. The section on the aborted tour drags on a little and it might have been nice to hear a bit more of Otway's distinctive music. But, even with these minor gripes, you've still got to give it Four Headbutts.

It's not often that a documentary has as chequered a career as its subject. But Tony Palmer's Dvorák in Love? proved to be the most contentious of the prolific director's musical biographies. Originally commissioned by Czechoslovakian television in 1988, the 53-minute film was rejected because of its implied criticism of the Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. Riding to the rescue, Melvyn Bragg aired the item on The South Bank Show. But it finally reached its intended audience in 1989, when it became the first actuality to be screened on television after the Velvet Revolution.

The core of the picture centres on a recording of Dvorák's Cello Concerto in B minor, Opus 104 at the Rudolfinum in Prague in September 1988. Palmer eavesdrops on the conversations between soloist Julian Lloyd Webber, his recording producer and the veteran Václav Neumann, who was conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Although still quite young, Lloyd Webber knows exactly what he wants and it is fascinating to watch the negotiations taking place in broken English, Czech and German. However, aficionados will be more intrigued by the evolution of the performance and the way in which music becomes the shared mode of communication.

However, Palmer is also keen to use the session as a springboard to explore two lesser known aspects of Dvorák's personality. Although he was long married to Anna Cermáková and unhesitatingly credited the mother of his nine children (three of whom died in infancy) for making him a success through managing his professional and personal affairs, Dvorák's heart always belonged to her older sister, Josefina. She had spurned the country boy for a German count named Kaunitz, but she continued to inspire many notable pieces of music. But it was the news that Josefina was gravely ill that prompted Dvorák to write his Cello Concerto while he was serving as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York.

Josefina died a month after Dvorák returned to Prague in April 1895 and he added motifs from the song `Leave Me Alone' to reflect his grief. But Palmer suggests that unrequited love was not the only motive for this impassioned work. He uses readings by Polish actor Vladek Sheybal from Dvorák's letters to examine his loathing of the Hapsburg monarchy and the fact that his home territory of Bohemia was so repressed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, the concerto epitomised a dual longing that Palmer bolsters by showing archival footage of the traumatic history of Czechoslovakia from its formation at the end of the Great War, though its break-up and conquest by the Third Reich in the late 1930s, to its subjugation and occupation by the Red Army in 1945 and 1968 respectively.

Produced in the same year that Palmer made Testimony, his masterly study of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, this tele-film may (perhaps fittingly) be a minor work. But it ably combines the intensity of the sessions for what has become a classic recording with an insight into the men behind the music and its significance in the life of a proud and unbowed nation.