Published in The Australian, October 9 2003

Love Is In The Air, 7:30pm, ABC

If you produced a documentary that was not only a ratings winner but also spawned a profitable concert series, the odds are you'd be asked to investigate a sequel.

So it's no surprise that the ABC has followed up the hit doco It's a Long Way to the Top with this new effort. Where the former series focused on rock acts in a fairly chronological fashion, Love Is in the Air promises "stories of Australian pop music" over the past five decades.

To be honest, this is just asking for trouble. There's a long tradition of documenting rock music, and its history has been argued out with enough intensity to allow something like a consensus to be reached. Few people bother to take pop music (a broader field that incorporates rock alongside anything else people have purchased in quantity) anywhere near that seriously, and it's much harder to pick out broad trends. Pop, by its very nature, is a somewhat fickle beast.

The only real conclusion to be drawn is that popular music is a business. While we've all got pop songs that resonate with great moments in our lives, the big-picture story is of putting out anything that will sell and treading on anyone who gets in the way of that process. This, in fact, could make a great series, but it wouldn't be very uplifting.

Uplift is rather clearly what Love Is in the Air is aiming for.

If all you want from a music documentary is to be overwhelmed with waves of nostalgia – staring at the screen with your mouth agape at the appalling fashions while half-forgotten celebrities from the 1960s and '70s mime poorly – then Love Is in the Air will deliver in spades.

True, many of the stars haven't aged at all well in their contemporary interviews, but the vintage footage of them performing on long-forgotten variety showcases may well be worth the price of admission if you're just seeking a chuckle. While the bulk of the emphasis is on highly successful performers – Kylie, Olivia, Crowded House, Savage Garden – there are plenty of washed-up one-hit wonders (Kim Hart and Joe Dolce) to tickle your reminiscing bone.

If, on the other hand, you're seeking some sort of insight, or even just narrative coherence, then you may have a problem.

The first episode, entitled "The Last Gig on Earth", is supposed to be themed around the influence of touring acts on the local scene in the '50s and '60s, but veers off frequently to discuss early examples of Australians succeeding overseas. The highlight is undoubtedly Harry M. Miller recalling Judy Garland's disastrous Australian tour in 1963 – he doesn't mince his words in describing her fondness for recreational and medicinal drugs – but her story doesn't seem to have much to do with anything else being presented.

Episode two, which looks at female solo singers with a particular emphasis on Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy, hangs together better, but still stops well short of drawing anything resembling a conclusion.

While the series isn't supposed to be encyclopedic in nature, that's no excuse for the rather frequent factual errors. To cite just two: the original version of Je T'Aime was not sung by Brigitte Bardot, and the Bee Gees' New York Mining Disaster 1941 was not a No 1 hit in any major market. None of this is earth-shattering, but it is annoying.

There are also some poor editing decisions. The years for crucial events are rarely mentioned or flagged on screen, so whole decades can pass at an alarming rate. As well, attempts to re-enact events described by the interview subjects seem like a waste of time when there's so much footage available for the topic being covered.

Again, it needs to be emphasised that pop music is a difficult subject for most people to take seriously. Love Is in the Air is to be commended for treating it as worthy of proper documentation. It's just a pity that the end result lacks that certain indefinable something. Like great pop itself, identifying the magic element can be difficult, but you can always tell when it's missing.