My Life as a Rolling Stone, BBC2 review — celebration of the band’s magnetism, craft and endurance

“No clichés!” Mick Jagger declares at the start of My Life as a Rolling Stone, a new interview-led BBC documentary series. It’s a proclamation that might’ve carried more weight had it not just followed an intro spiel (narrated by Sienna Miller) filled with the same old truisms about how they were the prototypical rock band.

Some clichés are just facts, but many fanciful, mythologised images have been carved into the Stones during their decades at the top. Over the four episodes — each devoted to one of the mainstay band members, including the late Charlie Watts — the show seeks to provide novel and intimate perspectives that tell a more authentic story of the group than the various on (and off) stage antics.

We begin, naturally, with Jagger. There are smatterings of biography from the LSE years to the LSD years and beyond. But more than an exhausting personal history, the episode is an absorbing account of his cultivated personality. While he doesn’t quite try to sanitise his past, Jagger is eager to highlight the artifice behind the braggadocio and the bad boy reputation. You can feel his long-standing frustration for how the press demonised the band as a “group of addicts rather than a group of musicians”. 

There is plenty of focus on Jagger’s diligence in studying his forebears, as well as his savvy harnessing of the power of television and commercial branding. Those who know him use words such as “rigour”, “honour” and “discipline”, while the external observers rely on “rebel” and “animal”. 

Keith Richards is reframed as a gentle soul rather than an agent of chaos. He is warm, funny and a little laconic; his raspy laugh often supplements his commentary. He gets the line of the series — about how Brian Epstein disguised that the Beatles were “filthy slime like [us]” — and is commendably candid about his substance abuse issues. “I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it’s a rough old world,” he says with touching understatement.

There is a reluctance to paint things black. Though granularity can’t be expected from a sweeping survey, there are significant and painful memories — from the infamous and tragic Altamont Free Concert to founding member Brian Jones’s death — that are given scant attention. But you can’t always get what you want, and as a diamond anniversary celebration of their magnetism, craft and endurance, the documentary makes for a thoroughly enjoyable viewing. Here’s to the next 60 years.

★★★★☆

On BBC2 from July 2 at 9pm; all episodes on iPlayer thereafter 

Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first