"Yet he [Martin Carthy] came over as someone with a gigantic King Edward potato welded firmly to his shoulder."

I didn't get that impression at all.

I thought that all concerned were pretty fair-minded, given how overwhelmingly pompous MacColl (bless im) came across in those recordings.

The most critical things (towards the process and towards MacColl) in that programme were voiced by the participants. Not by Martin Carthy.

If you really wanted to claim that programme as being an inditement of MacColl's pedagogy, you could point to the way it concluded with Roberta Flack's cover of one of his love songs.

While it didn't overtly say so, it adeptly demonstrated that MacColl - ironically - was at his most populist and likeable when he wasn't being a try-hard manifesto-follower.

(Me, I always thought both MacColl and Peggy Seeger's sloganeering, political songs were terrible, godawful and clunky; whereas their simple, autobiographical stuff - songs about love and family - have at least some poetry in their souls)