They also presented MacColl and Lloyd as the leaders of left-wing influence in music and arts at the time, leaving out many active communists, presumably because they did not fit the preconception. Before my time (my DoB 1948) but told to me by a man whose only top 10 hit was in 1957! It overstated the influence of skiffle, which was but a stepping stone for many - into folk, or jazz (same source, man who played with Donegan and Barber).

They totally ignored the basis of the 1954 Folk Music Council defnition of folk music (posted by me elsewhere in this forum) including the fact that folk music as well as being handed down by the oral tradition had to be modified by it, which wholly gainsays the MacColl/Seeger assumption that they and only they know what the tradition was for we can modify our own folk music in transmission, by definition (and how would an American have known about our tradition anyway?)

MacColl lacks all credibility (for me) about authenticity since he pretended to be Scottish.

The attempt at political labelling of C# House on the one hand and MacColl on the other distorts much of what I have been told about the period, and the references to the bowderisation at C# House largely ignored the fact that mostly unbowderised versions were retained, and the published censored versions were the only practical way to publish at the time. Mind you even the Penguin version of "Jackie Boy" still has meaning if you think!

Interesting, but spoiled in my view by an intent to be unnecessarily politically controversial.