Imagine: Simon and Garfunkel – The Harmony Game (BBC1)

I’ve decided that if reincarnation does exist, I’m coming back as Alan Yentob, writes Andrew Owen.

It’s not a bad old life, his: fly around the world, visit interesting locations and pop up on the telly for a few minutes once a week to introduce someone else’s film. I could do that.

Take last night, for example, and the story of the recording process that led to Simon and Garfunkel’s multi-million selling Bridge Over Troubled water album.

It started in Forest Hills, Queens, a suburb of New York City, where Alan popped up to tell us that he was in Forest Hills, Queens, a suburb of New York City.

He was there because that’s where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were schoolboys before becoming Tom and Jerry the childhood singers, and then Simon and Garfunkel the stars.

Introduction over, Alan cleared off and we were into Jennifer Lebeau’s film.

This was a fascinating hour or so of interviews and archive footage, but I noticed on the end credits that the producers included a certain Paul Simon and one Art Garfunkel, which probably explains why the documentary lacked a certain depth. (It’s also included as a DVD on the album’s 40th anniversary reissue.)

There was plenty of film of the two in their prime, and interviews with them as they are today, but while it was undoubtedly fascinating to learn how they got the drums or the wordless chorus on The Boxer to sound the way they do, we didn’t learn that much about Simon and Garfunkel’s relationship.

For a programme about harmony, the two were interviewed separately.

Theirs is a famously fractious partnership, although by all accounts they’re now on good terms once again.

So they spoke about each other with genuine warmth, but it would have been nice to have seen them together, bouncing memories off each other – actually, it would have been nice to have seen them bouncing each other off the walls, for that matter, but we didn’t dwell on the negatives.

Instead, they spoke about having wanted to take a break from each other, of needing a rest, of the fact that, in Art Garfunkel’s words, “when it was over you could not ask for a better place to be”.

Oh come off it, lads, you were thinking, you couldn’t stand the sight of each other for years afterwards. Tell us what really happened , who hit whom?

Go on . . .

But instead Art Garfunkel spoke bafflingly about ‘a fountain of delight’ , and why they couldn’t get back together in the studio over the intervening 40 years was never really explained.

Quite a lot of the film used clips from Songs of America, a 1969 documentary of the duo on tour and in the studio.

BBC4 showed it straight afterwards and, of the two films, it was definitely the better, a view into a lost world of the Kennedys, political upheaval and incredible songwriting.

And Alan Yentob was nowhere to be seen.