‘The Hacienda: The Club That Shook Britain’ documentary will be shown on BBC2 this Saturday

Wise Owl have been making some great pop culture docs recently – their Nirvana doc  last year was a huge success and the Leeds-based company has been doing that rarest of things – getting music culture onto prime-time TV with docs that take hallowed subjects with an entertaining seriousness.

Timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the opening of this iconic club, the new documentary charts the Hacienda’s cultural legacy which is still as strong as ever. It combines rare and unseen archive footage with first-hand insightful testimony from those who were involved during the Hacienda’s heyday.

This Saturday night at 10.15 on BBC2 this is a look at that most holy of night-clubs – the Hacienda and the preview event in Manchester last night at HOME cinema brought the house down. With a mixture of faces in the audience and in the film from the punters who made the dance floor that ecstatic life-changing place to the likes of Peter Hook, Ben Kelly and Kath McDermott who spoke on the panel afterwards it was a great launch for the story of the club that has reached well deserved iconic status.

The glowing testimonies from the punters who made the club to the familiar faces in the film tell the whole life-affirming tale. There are great quotes from Noel Gallagher’s pithy hilarity to Peter Hook’s and Stephen Morris’s despair at the new order bankrolling of the  club to club manager Ang Mathews telling it as it was from the front line to thankfully Mike Pickering getting a well-deserved spotlight for his adventurous booking policy and DJ’ing that pretty well created the club legend to Shaun Ryder being typically hilarious and wise at the same time to  LTW boss John Robb putting it all into context.

There are many others in there from each era – from the white elephant early days when the club audaciously parachuted into a mound manchester and woke the city up to its wild heyday to its gangster hell to its late resurgence with the flamboyant gay Flesh nights and all peppered with those classic gigs. Somehow they tell the in-depth story of 15 years of glorious chaos and artful hedonism in a club that was much more than a club in one hour.

There’s lots of Joy Division, New Order and Factory in there and it places the club neatly into the modern Manchester narrative where the whole city now looks like the club that does not exist anymore – an irony that the glorious Anthony H’s beautiful blue eyes will be smirking intellectually at from the Salford heavens.

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