The RPO has had a colourful and chequered history since its foundation in 1946 by Sir Thomas Beecham. It’s a good story and writer, producer and director Andrew Colin Davies has assembled an impressive and busily edited array of archive footage, stills and interviews to tell it. Nicely presented with an excellent booklet (“Stephen Pettitt 2006, edited RPO 2009”), the DVD’s menu allows you to dip into each decade of the story – “1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s” – replete with redundant apostrophes. But the film has a puzzling provenance. It seems to be an old documentary spliced on to a more recent one. Without any information on the packaging, there is no way of knowing. The many on-camera encomiums from some of the famous names connected with the orchestra must have been shot well before André Previn walked with today’s pronounced stoop and Ashkenazy’s hair turned white (like that of Andrew Sachs’s, the film’s genial narrator). Here are Menuhin (d1999) and the great Jack Brymer (d2003) speaking to us of their love of the orchestra long before they departed for the great concert hall in the sky but edited as though they were still with us. The style of the captions identifying each contributor (and, indeed, the contributors’ clothes) I would date at c1975 but, no, here is Slatkin rehearsing the Elgar with Kennedy in the orchestra’s new home, Cadogan Hall (rather more fitting than the Odeon, Swiss Cottage, their base in the 1960s).

The latter part of the film finds the orchestra on their 2008 American tour with a noticeable improvement in picture quality and retaining Sachs as narrator – though off-screen. The script, a litany of financial woes, management upheavals and fights for survival, is efficient but gives the film the tone of an in-house promo assembled by people too close to the RPO to be objective. Board meetings, accountants and managers do not for gripping viewing make, and if one more person had said what a close-knit/great/versatile/hard-working/friendly band the RPO is, I’d have turned into Violet Elizabeth Bott. Charles Groves’s and Yuri Temirkanov’s tenures are skimped on; Gatti’s 2009 departure is alluded to, Dutoit’s arrival omitted. A strange piece of work – blemished, bemusing but benvenuto.