How do you make a sympathetic TV show about the most cancelled, most banned, most shamelessly vile band ever – when your cast have barely heard of them and the frontman is taking you to court? The director reveals all
Danny Boyle is sitting in his kitchen sounding faintly surprised that his latest project has been made at all. “It’s so not the story that everybody wants to be told,” he says, “but it is the story that should be told.” Pistol, a six-part miniseries, certainly isn’t the first drama about the Sex Pistols. There was Alex Cox’s 1986 movie Sid and Nancy, as well as The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle – a game attempt by the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren to claim the whole thing was a brilliantly orchestrated money-making scheme. But Boyle’s is by far the most ambitious.
It is based on Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, Steve Jones’s fantastic, occasionally harrowing autobiography, which takes readers from the guitarist’s horrendous childhood (he was sexually abused by his stepfather) to that infamous, expletive-filled appearance the band made on ITV’s Today show. It then covers the notoriety that followed, including the band’s messy collapse during a US tour and the horrific aftermath, which culminated in bassist Sid Vicious dying of a heroin overdose while on bail, charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
