The trouble I had persuading my parents to have their Sunday afternoon tea to a soundtrack of Simon Rattle and 20th-century music – and for seven weeks on the trot! Still, the effort of winning their grudging acquiescence was worth it, as a reappraisal of the first three Leaving Home programmes confirms. The series was one of the last intelligent contributions to classical music by British television and, even by 1996, one suspects that only a musician of Rattle’s stature and determination could have got it made; it would be impossible today. The backroom team was formidable; Melvyn Bragg, Barrie Gavin, Hilary Chadwick and the late Sue Knussen, all of whom had long-gestated ideas about how to proselytise one artform (serious music) on another that in many ways is its antithesis and nemesis.

‘Leaving Home’ signals a departure not just from tonality but also from British shores: as the German title has it, Die Revolution der Klänge. The line is unapologetically deterministic, the content confident enough to challenge: no room here for the second-rate or ‘shamefully neglected’. The Tristan chord leads to the chromaticism of Elektra and inevitably to 12-tone music; in ‘Rhythm’, Beethoven’s Ninth, gamelan and cityscapes are the engines which turn Stravinsky’s Rite into Boulez’s Rituel via Varèse, Ligeti and Nancarrow. ‘Colour’ centres more on the French innovators from Debussy and Ravel to Messiaen and Takemitsu. Where Leonard Bernstein’s famous Norton lectures juxtapose solid blocks of talk and music, Peter West’s direction is more teasing: we get the M25 at night for Boulez’s Notation I as well as the usual shots of men in big hats walking too quickly around turn-of-the-century cities beneath Rattle’s narrative.

For all his thematic hooks, Rattle, like Bernstein, tells a continuous story, best appreciated as a whole. That makes ArtHaus’s layout of one 50-minute documentary per DVD expensive and not wholly offset by a CD’s-worth of bonus audio tracks. The complete Turangalîla (on Volume 2) and Jeux (Volume 3) are taken from Rattle’s EMI catalogue. The Berg Violin Concerto and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht on Volume 1 are from Naxos discs; lack of further attribution or details is not only legally suspect but insulting to the artists concerned.

The cue points do not correspond to either the numbers on screen or the movement breaks: all most puzzling. So bring on Volumes 4-7, with better ancillary material. If we are really lucky, Volume 5 will contain a complete recording of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.