"I don't accept that the rise of electric folk had any detrimental effect on MacColl's popularity"

I did find that to be a strange assertion the programme made- it seemed to suggest that MacColl cut an increasingly forlorn figure as he became marginalised. An amusing theory, but is there any hard evidence to back it? It's probably true that the Critics Group seemed a little starchy compared to the new folk-rockers, but that's hardly enough to justify such a flimsy point

"I'm not saying that Steeleye Span's version of All around my hat was the very best folk could offer at the time...but it did get me into folk"

Hear, hear! When I heard this song and Gaudete on the radio it really stirred something inside me, and I'm eternally grateful that Steeleye reached out to the masses, even though some felt they compromised too much in doing so

But what about the programme makers' point that by the end of the 70s folk had become a parody of itself? In order to prove this shaky premise we got footage of the Strawbs playing "Part of the union" and Lindisfarne playing "Fog on the Tyne". Both bands were only on the margins of folk, but we could just as easily have been shown the other hits from the same albums, "Lay down" and "Meet me on the corner". Instead we got each band's more jocular offering, presumably to demonstrate that the scene had turned into one bog joke. Which is bollocks, in my opinion