I don’t know how often you tune into Ovation. It’s a rather creaky cable network consisting of taped symphony performances, infomercials for alternative cancer treatments and the odd musical documentary — a perfect home for Ray Davies, in other words. Last night the network presented a biopic about the king Kink entitled The World from My Window, and I dutifully sat down to watch it even though I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be much news there for me, having read and even written a fair amount about the Kinks.

What was new was the voice of the master himself, interviewed during the recording of his slightly feeble solo album, Other People’s Lives. Where interviews often capture an acerbic Davies, equally resentful of the years of neglect and the intrusions on his privacy publicity demands, here he seemed positively mellow. True, it came off at times as an elaborate piece of PR (there were no hostile questions re past drug use, sexual proclivities or even his famous battles with brother Dave) but I got the sense that Ray has finally made peace with himself.

Take “Waterloo Sunset.” I have read Ray on the subject of that pop mini-epic countless times and could scarcely imagine what new he could say about its composition — until he talked about walking across the Waterloo Bridge with his daughter, and how he related her future happiness to that of his own scattered family. For all his quirks, or kinks, Davies has a heart as big as all outdoors; that’s what puts his songwriting on a par with Lennon-McCartney’s (and a step above Jagger-Richards’): his sensitivity, his ability to see the sadness and the promise of each sun setting over whatever place you call home.

Speaking of his early influences, Ray name-checked Chuck Berry — not all that surprising in and of itself except that the song he chose to expound on was “Memphis.” That number has always made me a little squeamish; whether adroitly covered by Johnny Rivers or Geoff Muldaur you could not get away from the fact that it was about a man in love with a girl who was… six years old. Lower than Humbert Humbert, a real Short Eyes. But Ray’s take was that it was about a custody fight: a father who could not see his daughter: “We were pulled apart because her mom did not agree/She tore apart a happy home in Memphis, Tennessee.” I was struck by the generosity of Davies’ interpretation, as well as his acknowledgment that Memphis wasn’t all that far from Muswell.

There are some great bits of vanished video tucked in there, too (I particularly loved a film meant to accompany “Dead End Street” that Top of the Pops refused to air: it features the band dressed as Dickensian undertakers, carrying a coffin) and the obligatory interviews with singer-songwriters indebted to the Master. Bob Geldof says that hearing “Days” made him want to slit his wrists, knowing he would never write anything as good, while Elvis Costello (who covered it for the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ ‘Til the End of the World) confesses that the introduction of the spiritual aspect (“those endless days, those sacred days you gave me”) always made him a bit uncomfortable. He could never go there, he said. Few of us can.