David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust

Pulling footage from Pennebaker’s concert film, and a great deal of rare footage, and narrated by Jarvis Cocker, the BBC documentary David Bowie: The Story of Ziggy Stardust does what Pennebaker’s film refused to; it tells a story, in typical TV documentary fashion, of the rise of Ziggy. And it’s not a story that many fans know. The first part of the film addresses Cocker’s question: “What made this mysterious extra-terrestrial one of the most influential cultural icons of the 20th century?” It turns out, quite a lot went into the making of Bowie’s 1973 breakthrough as Ziggy Stardust. In fact, says Cocker, “at that time,” when Bowie emerged as this seemingly fully-formed character, “we didn’t realize that he’d been trying to be successful for 10 years.”