Jimi Hendrix plays Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind at an all-black Harlem dance. The crowd turn hostile, and he is forced to flee for his life. Glen Matlock steals an Abba guitar riff and – hey presto – it becomes the Sex Pistols’ anthem Pretty Vacant. The Judas Priest singer Rob Halford goes shopping for gay S&M gear, and unwittingly invents the classic heavy metal uniform. Noel Gallagher writes Wonderwall, a song he dislikes, but it makes him “a millionaire four times in one week”.

This is just a snapshot of the wealth of stories in the documentary series, The Seven Ages of Rock, which airs on BBC Two next fortnight. Packed with rare footage and super-star interviews, this TV banquet is the latest in a pedigree portfolio of pop shows made at BBC Bristol by the producer William Naylor. Over the past decade, Naylor and his team have set the gold standard for rock television with Dancing in the Street, the country-driven Lost Highway, the songwriter history Walk on By and the Soul Deep series on black pop.

“What we have here is seven hours of music television with some of the greatest artists, producers, songwriters and musicians from the last 40 years,” Naylor says of The Seven Ages of Rock.“These are big names, iconic stories — Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Nirvana — plus great archive footage, much of it rare, some of it unseen.”

Like these previous shows, The Seven Ages of Rock mostly retells history straight from the source. Which means interviews with Keith Richards, Lou Reed, David Gilmour, Noel Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Johnny Marr, Roger Daltry, Bryan Ferry, John Lydon, Debbie Harry, Ozzy Osbourne, Pete Doherty and more.

All this celebrity access, recalls Naylor’s assistant producer, Tony Higgins, required 18 months of tortuous negotiation. “John Lydon took the best part of a year to get,” says Higgins. “But what helped a lot is that many people had seen our previous projects. For instance, Noel Gallagher agreed to be a part of it because he had seen Soul Deep.Oasis were watching it on their tour bus.”

Higgins describes Dancing in the Street and Soul Deep as “high-end, blue-chip, world-renowned” shows that only the BBC could make. But even with such heavyweight calling cards, some stars still eluded them. Patti Smith, Mick Jagger and David Bowie all declined to be interviewed.

“Certain people you know you’re never going to get,” admits Higgins, “like Neil Young or Bob Dylan. But in some ways, you don’t need them. I’ve never heard an interview with Jagger where you go away learning any more about him than you did before. He’s a master of obfuscation. You want someone who can actually contribute to the programme.”

The writer and social historian Jon Savage, who appears as a commentator in Seven Ages, has experience of making music documentaries himself. In the punk era, he recalls, there was “virtually no youth media” and rock was rarely seen on television.

Now it is everywhere, from the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage to Later with Jools Holland to endless archive list shows. Quantity is up, but quality varies wildly.

“A lot of TV pop documentaries are sloppy and slung together on the cheap,” Savage says. “It’s actually very hard in the current television economy to fund proper documentaries, now that there are a lot more stations out there. It’s much easier to get on the conveyor belt and slap something together. But there is a point to telling history properly, if you can.”

Seven Ages certainly makes a decent fist of doing so, even if it draws some fairly arbitrary and potentially contentious chapter divisions. Each loosely chronological episode revolves around a handful of like-minded key artists. The art rock programme, for example, yokes together the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Genesis.

Punk becomes “a tale of two cities”, London and New York. The rise of American alternative rock, meanwhile, is embodied in the parallel careers of R.E.M. and Nirvana. More controversially, perhaps, the 1960s is embodied by guitar god Jimi Hendrix, with Bob Dylan and the Beatles mere supporting players in his drama.

“That’s one of the problems of shows like this,” Higgins admits. “How do you approach punk again? How do you approach the 1960s again? How do you approach Britpop again? All these moments that are very heavily picked over, there is very little flesh left on the carcass of these cultural corpses. It’s difficult to find a fresh angle on these stories, but I think we’ve done it.”

Seven Ages brings the story of British rock up to date in its final extended episode by tracing a line from the Smiths, via Blur and Oasis, to the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys. It also devotes an hour to the perennially popular but critically derided subculture of heavy metal. “It would have been really easy to laugh but millions of people are into it,” says Higgins. “It’s the longest surviving subgenre.

You can’t kill it, it just comes back stronger.”

Unlike Dancing in the Street, however, Seven Ages does not attempt an all-embracing history of pop. Besides Jimi Hendrix, there are almost no black faces. Outside the punk episode, very few women either.

“It is very male, very white,” concedes Higgins. “But frankly, there’s no way around that. We didn’t create that situation. The roots of rock certainly aren’t white, but the appropriation of black musical forms has been going on since jazz. It’s true that you can cut this subject hundreds of ways, but you’re only given X amount of television time, so you are working within very strict constraints. TV does surface very well. If you want detail, you go to books.”

Charles Shaar Murray, the series consultant and Hendrix biographer, defends the show’s narrow focus on rock as an overwhelmingly male and Caucasian genre. “On previous shows like Dancing in the Street, which I participated in a bit, I was very concerned that the history of black music should be told in parallel to all the white pop and rock stuff,” he argues. “But since that show fulfilled that brief, and subsequent programmes like Soul Deep have examined those other musics in their own right, it was interesting to examine rock with a capital R.”

Even within this capital-R definition, the Seven Ages format still excludes some major rock pioneers. No room for Iggy Pop, Led Zeppelin, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Primal Scream, PJ Harvey, the Cure, the Pretenders or Radiohead, for starters. Never mind more exotic acts with one foot in the rock world like Rage Against the Machine, Beastie Boys, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave or Prince.

“We were keen to find a place for Radiohead, but we just couldn’t,” says Sebastian Barfield, who produced and directed two chapters of Seven Ages. “A lot of it is driven by space and narrative. We don’t fill these films up with extraneous people. If you stop at every step of the way to pay your respects to everyone, I think it would be a less satisfying watch.”

“That’s the problem with all these programmes: what’s your definition?” admits Alastair Laurence, producer-director of the punk episode. “But with this programme we have got a website where you can post your views. There will hopefully be a sense of dialogue with the people watching.”

These niggles aside, The Seven Ages of Rock is absorbing and intelligent music television. It also manages to stand out in a media climate where rock was once marginalised, but is now a ubiquitous mega-brand.

“Pop music has become very big business,” Savage says. “It’s become integrated with the major media industries. It is one of the major planks of Western consumer culture. Pop has won, and there is a good side and a bad side to that. The good side is we can tell the stories of our youth. The bad side is it can become this ghastly mush.”

“Famine and glut both create their own downsides,” Murray argues. “I grew up at time when it was impossible to see or hear much pop on radio or TV. We now have a glut. Anybody who so desires can now listen to the pop or rock subgenre of their choice 24/7. You can look at music as entertainment, as culture, as social history. You can be as tribal as you want or as academic as you want. But I think

Seven Ages of Rockis a very conscientious and entertaining attempt to make sense of what’s been going on over the last 40-odd years.”

Naylor claims that “we’re much better served now than ever before” in terms of rock TV. But he also notes this proliferation has actually put many musicians beyond the reach of normal TV budgets. Seven Ages, which was co-funded by selling North American rights to the “heritage rock” channel VH-1 Classic, boasts the kind of glossy production values that are becoming rare.

“It’s a dying breed,” says Naylor. “We get maybe one of these every three years and I don’t know how much longer we can justify them.

They are expensive, they take a long time, and it’s harder to get contributors. Also they are very complicated in terms of rights. The levels of clearances are just baffling.”

In one sense, the Seven Ages team are victims of their own success. When they made Dancing in the Street 11 years ago, serious rock shows were a rarity. But in this instant-access age of infinite downloads and rising concert attendances, pop has become mainstream entertainment for all ages. Baby boomer dads and their kids now buy the same albums. The generation gap is closed.

“Something happened in the mid1990s,” says Barfield. “Britpop was part of it. There is an argument that Noel Gallagher pointed the way to young kids getting into the Beatles. My dad is 74 and he still talks about the excitement of seeing Bill Haley in Rock Around the Clock.There are pensioners who now regard themselves as part of the rock’n’roll generation. It was weird ten years ago when you had Tony Blair meeting Noel, but hearing David Cameron talking about the Smiths on the radio makes perfect sense now. Everyone connects to this music.”

The Seven Ages of Rock, BBC Two, starts on May 19

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