I’ll be leaving the band now

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2021.  

#27 : The Beatles: Get Back

Ambient Beatles? Slow Beatles? Peter Jackson’s Fab Four epic leaned into the sheer quantity of extraordinary footage at its creator’s disposal, capturing a band on the verge of dissolution but still full of heart and creative inspiration. Watching the song Get Back emerge, almost fully formed, from Paul McCartney’s fevered imagination was just one of numerous jaw-dropping moments.

After having been made to listen to many, many Beatles albums as part of the infamous Rolling Stone exercise, I'm more disposed towards them than I previously was and "Let It Be" is definitely up there amongst my favourite albums of theirs.  But...

...my initial suspicion is that I'd have to be quite a bit more a fanboy to sit down and watch 6 hours of them doing whatever it is they do.  And a lot of the reports I've heard suggest that they don't do an awful lot - amusingly Adam Buxton's wife watched it for 15 minutes and asked "Is anything going to happen?".  To which she was told that wasn't the point to it and she really didn't understand the beauty of it all.  Which hasn't exactly made me rush to watch it, yet here we are - I'll watch at least the first episode (all 2 hours 37 minutes of it).

And well - I would have to say that not an awful lot happens.  Episode one covers days 1-7 of a period where they plan to record a new album live in front of an audience, so it's all setting up the songs, location, personnel, etc.  But actually the episode mostly shows them all just sat around randomly jamming either some of their back catalogue or other people's songs.  And when I say a lot of the time, I mean a LOT of the time

It did give me plenty of time to make some observations though:

- George Harrison had the most fantastic speaking voice.
- Ringo always looks thoroughly disinterested - his RBF is resting bored face.
- Paul has many different singing voices.  None of which are exactly great.
- I like "The Two Of Us" but I don't think I needed to hear it played ten times.
- There's just too much earnest Paul trying to chivvy people along who don't want to be chivvied.
- It's weird watching people just sitting around in a huge empty studio.

They are obviously a clever bunch of blokes and there are some definite moments of genius, some obvious but there's also a lot of the subtle variety - for large parts of it, George and Ringo both just sit there doing very little but then subtly join in and improve matters.  The bit where "Get Back" emerges is probably the most widely shared clip and is indeed impressive, but it's also easily watched on YouTube without needing to watch the other 2.5 hours.  Although, to be fair, "The Long And Winding Road" bit was good too - so we're down to, oooh, only 2.45 hours of filler.

And yes, I'm being a bit unfair, but there is an awful lot of nothing going on here.  It's more interesting when they get rattier with each other - but it's not the band at each other's throats that you hear about (I believe this film misses the best of the arguments by a couple of years or so).  In the first episode, they don't really seem to hate each other - they have different outlooks and work ethics, but they have a surprising amount of time and tolerance for each other.  And there's even the odd nice snatched shot of Linda and Yoko chatting.

It was an interesting editorial choice to decide to place the point that George pissed off 12 minutes before the end of episode one - it feels like a proper cliff-hanger to me.  But no, the actual ending is more of a cliff-hanger - "At the weekend, they all met up at Ringo's house.  The meeting did not go well".  Which almost tempted me to watch episode 2 - but then I thought "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?".  I have, after all, spent the past week telling my family I'm off to watch "the most boring programme in the world".

Having said that, I did bizarrely enjoy the thing a lot more than I was expecting - but I couldn't tell you exactly why.  And I really enjoyed about 1% of it - I do think the option of a one/two hour version for normal people wouldn't have been a bad idea, leaving the six hours for the "serious" fans.  Looking at Wikipedia, I think there are bits in the other episodes I'd like as well, so when I'm feeling brave or can have the telly on without needing to watch it, I might stick the next episode on - but I'd struggle to say I feel it's really deserved further viewing on the strength of this episode.  If you LOVE The Beatles though, I imagine you'll LOVE this as well because it feels like proper fanboy service - it's on Disney+, but I imagine all those who are going to love this have already watched it.

#26 - Another great bit of telly I wouldn't have otherwise watched
#28 - Some impressive acting and writing