This is - as the title suggests - supposed to be about the immense influence Ted Albert had on Australian rock music. And I'm not going to claim otherwise. But to me - as a massive fan of Flash and the Pan - it was mostly a movie about the Young family, AC/DC, and most importantly Vanda and Young. This is a TV mini-series, with two episodes of an hour each.

In 1963, a large chunk of the Young family (including eight(?!) sons) emigrated from Scotland to Australia. In the Villawood Migrant Hostel, George Young met Netherlands immigrant Johannes Hendrikus Jacob van den Berg who he named "Harry Vanda," and the two shortly formed a band called The Easybeats. You may not remember that name, but I bet you've heard their most famous song: "Friday on My Mind" (also written by Vanda and Young). It was Ted Albert who gave them their recording contract. While the Easybeats were rocketing to fame, Malcolm and Angus Young were learning guitar and cooking up a little band called AC/DC. And Vanda and Young were in London (and maybe Los Angeles) writing songs for other bands after the dissolution of the Easybeats. AC/DC had a long road of mostly money-losing touring to get them to fame, and it was Ted Albert who bankrolled them for a couple of their worst years. Vanda and Young recorded and engineered AC/DC's first eight albums in Albert's studio: that's right, these were the guys in the booth for "Dirty Deeds," "Highway to Hell," and "Back in Black." And for a while, Vanda and Young wrote and recorded their own stuff again with this weird band (that I love) called Flash and the Pan that was big in Europe. I'm leaving out a dozen other bands and artists that went through that Albert-Vanda-Young factory because they didn't interest me as much.

Perhaps the most surprising thing to me was Ted Albert wanted to do a movie - and did. When his wife took him to this quirky little musical called "Strictly Ballroom," he knew he'd found the right one. In case you don't know how that ended, a bunch of unknown actors with a first time director called "Baz Luhrmann" made a low budget film that was widely critically acclaimed and swept the world.

One of Vanda and Young's most unusual practices was how they recorded several of their bands. They noticed that several of the pub bands sounded fantastic at the pub ... and flat and uninspiring on recordings. They realized it was that live energy that was missing - so for a decade(?) they were dragging their bands straight from their pub gigs into the studio for a recording session. Their work hours became midnight until 6 AM. It seems to have worked ...

The series felt a little self-serving, a bit of a hagiography, and I wondered if the Albert family had some money in this production. But checking other sources after watching the series, it all seems to be pretty close to the truth. It's a hell of a story.