I HOPE you don't mind, but every now and again I like to expand the remit of this column so that I can recommend - or disrecommend - more than just CDs. In years to come I hope to become one of those buffoonish experts on afternoon TV with a bow-tie, a dusty velvet jacket and a face full of broken blood vessels, pontificating effeminately and at length about the best way to date and value a Faberge egg you might have unearthed at a jumble sale.

In the meantime, however, allow me to turn my rheumy gaze upon some DVDs which have been brought to my attention in recent weeks, courtesy of those amiable bods at Optimum whose release schedule is characterised by no end of weird wonderments.

Very much to my taste are three archaeological treasures from the very dawn of beat music, namely Catch Us If You Can, Gonks Go Beat and Pop Gear. The last-named of these is a kind of "class of 1964" round-up of the bands and artistes who contributed to the so-called "British Invasion" of the USA in that banner year, introduced somewhat startlingly by a professionally zany Jimmy Savile.

It's a fascinating and invaluable document, looking for all the world as though it stems from an era before time itself. The camera roams around in a vast, airless studio dressed with nightmarishly vivid sets, in front of which the relevant band or artiste will come to life and mime a song when the camera is directed upon them. It's like limbo as imagined by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, oddly and inexplicably disquieting yet not without its charm.

Some of the participants survive the process with more dignity than others, unsurprisingly. The Animals, crammed into their tiny suits like Gerry Anderson puppets, nevertheless look fantastically hungry, seedy and deranged as they run through House Of The Rising Sun and Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood. The Nashville Teens rock like cavemen on the tough and lean Tobacco Road, and an unthinkably young Spencer Davis Group gallop through My Babe with freshly-scrubbed exuberance.

One of the wildest performances, unexpectedly, comes from The Four Pennies of all people, who tear demonically through Black Girl like condemned men. The song, incidentally, is a 19th century American folk ballad perhaps best known nowadays via Nirvana's reading on MTV Unplugged, when it was called Where Did You Sleep Last Night.

It's highly doubtful that Susan Maughan, Matt Monro (great as he was) or Tommy Quickly & The Remo Four played any significant part in the British Invasion, but their inclusion here is a reminder of the schizophrenic nature of pop music in the early 1960s, where at any moment your favourite band could be replaced in the charts by a show tune or a sea shanty performed by glove puppet or a benign but straight-laced chaperone.

The whole enterprise is bookended by sterling Beatles performances flown in from elsewhere. By 1964, they were already fast escaping the gravitational pull of their peers further down the ladder.

Gonks Go Beat, meanwhile, is in effect a 1965 version of Romeo & Juliet, although this is perhaps conferring rather too much dignity on a project which is unsurpassed in its supreme daftness. The title provides a telling clue that one shouldn't go expecting a Federico Fellini production from a screenplay by Samuel Beckett, but boy, this is so lowbrow that you can actually feel the crenellations of your brain wearing smooth as you watch it.

I lapped it up, of course. The "plot", such as it is, is risible, as you would expect from any film with Kenneth Connor in the lead role, but it deserves preserving if only for a rare glimpse of The Graham Bond Organisation gurning their way through a fantastically wanton and animated version of Harmonica. A year later, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker would become world-famous as the frowning musos who accompanied Eric Clapton in Cream, yet here they are looking as though they have been issued with jockstraps filled with soldier ants by the production team.

Pick of the three films by a country mile is Catch Us If You Can - ostensibly a vehicle for The Dave Clark Five, whose "Tottenham Sound" displaced The Beatles in the public's affection for about six minutes in 1963. So far so unpromising, but this 1965 offering is actually a thoughtful and well-executed piece of work, tempering its requisite 1960s youth iconography with a mature cynicism and mordant wit.

The end result is that it works on all manner of levels. Shot in classy high-contrast black and white and directed by John Boorman (later to direct Deliverance and Point Blank), it pushes all the right buttons for addicts of the genre - much capering about in stripy T-shirts and white E-Type Jaguars - but it also boasts some lyrical and downbeat scenes, as if in solemn acknowledgement of its own ephemerality.

Finally, a cause for unconfined joy is Optimum's Jean-Luc Godard Boxset Volume 1 (Volume 2 follows in July), which brings together four of the great man's extraordinary films plus a bonus disc of interview and documentary material. Included are Passion, Made In The USA, Alphaville and, best of all, A Bout De Souffle, the 1959 film which effectively birthed the "nouvelle vague" of French cinema.

Godard's techniques - jump-cuts, soundtrack manipulation, non-sequential narrative - may have been copied so often since that they have now become stock methods, but seeing them employed the first time round will leave you appropriately breathless.

And was Paris in 1959 the nearest the world ever came to resembling paradise?