Three decades after the Fab Four’s history was chronicled in Anthology, there’s now an extra chapter. Theirs is a long and winding road – but an endlessly compelling one
Add The Beatles Anthology to your watchlist Because nothing with the Beatles is ever entirely over, 30 years after the three remaining members, Paul, George and Ringo, brought forth their long-threatened Beatles Anthology – an eight-part series of TV documentaries, accompanied by three double CDs of previously unreleased versions of some of their best-known tunes plus, if you were a completist, an enormous book – they are releasing a remastered version. It comes with an additional part nine, made up of footage shot in and around the launch of that Anthology project and featuring the Fab Three, known at the time as “the Threetles”. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of revelation, this film of their reunion provides even more of the one thing Beatles watchers most crave, which is to watch them in the room with each other, just behaving. This will never not be fascinating. Here are three middle-aged men, all at the time over 50, Englishly keen to demonstrate their ordinariness, drinking tea from workmen’s mugs and playing with any toy at hand, while also strongly hinting that decades before, they were bonded for all time by an experience the rest of us cannot possibly understand. “I was 17 in Hamburg,” says George. “By the time I was 23 we had done Sgt Pepper.” Take that, pop stars of today. Like most gentlemen of their generation, born during the Second World War when lips were stiff, they are not natural practitioners of the newly voguish male hug, but they do it. You didn’t catch them collapsing into each other’s arms at the end of marathon performances the way bands do today. This was partly because they were rarely on for more than half an hour, and partly because Brian Epstein had instructed them in the importance of announcing the show’s end by forming up and executing a smart bow from the waist. A montage shows them performing this same signature move at the end of shows in front of everyone from stiff royals to demented teens. As a three-piece they can never be entirely back in the groove. The cross-talk act, which they practised at press conferences back in the day, is missing John. Interviewed as a trio on two occasions, at Abbey Road and at George Harrison’s place in Henley, Paul appears guarded in the presence of George, who as the youngest member is always alive to perceived slights. They’re more comfortable when they have something to do with their hands. When they gather at George’s house in the summer of 1994, Paul and George play acoustic guitars, Ringo keeps the volume down by taking up his brushes and they sound like nothing so much as a skiffle group, which is where it all began. For repertoire they reach for the songs that come naturally: Ain’t She Sweet, a hit from the Roaring Twenties, Blue Moon of Kentucky, a bluegrass waltz from the 1940s, and Baby What You Want Me to Do, a Jimmy Reed song that was on the rhythm and blues chart long before they first released a record. That’s the kind of hinterland bands had in those days. When they sit around and talk about the past, it’s the simple things they remember. Combing their hair forwards for the first time, getting their boots at Anello & Davide, getting £100 for John’s birthday, realising after a few hits that they were getting away with it. “It was all accidental really,” says George. “The funny haircuts and jackets and boots. We had something together even if it was just an attitude. You get certain people together and you get fire or dynamite.” Paul looks at a picture of them posing in Edwardian bathing suits on the beach at Weston-super-Mare in 1963 and laughs: “Here they are – the hippest group in history!” When the three of them sit at the mixing desk while George Martin pulls back the faders to deconstruct the mix of Tomorrow Never Knows, they can’t help being amused by the Heath Robinson nature of many of those sounds. Not for them the reverent silence that attends that ceremony today. They know how this particular sausage was made. “Now it’s serious music,” says Paul, smirking as he recalls the days when they were doing the impossible because nobody had said they couldn’t and it was a bit of a laugh. They all have different memories. Ringo says that if he’d made Anthology it would have been different. Because bands talk about anything but the things that are bothering them, Paul is able to say, “I found out stuff about the other guys I never knew from the Anthology.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/04/GettyImages-1194303044-251e993-e1743692123693.jpg" width="7088" height="4725" alt="English singer, songwriter and guitarist John Lennon (1940-1980), English singer and drummer Ringo Starr, English singer, songwriter and guitarist George Harrison (1943-2001), and English singer, songwriter and bassist Paul McCartney, all of The Beatles, during their world premiere of "All You Need Is Love" on the television show "Our World," recorded in EMI's Studio One, June 25, 1967, in London, England." title="The Beatles Perform "All You Need Is Love"" /> The variance in their individual recollections doesn’t just relate to things back in the mists of history. Paul says the idea to make Real Love came from a conversation he had with Yoko Ono in which she said she had an old demo cassette featuring John. George reckons it grew out of the Traveling Wilburys’ plan to “replace” the late Roy Orbison with the voice of Elvis Presley, an idea The King’s estate was apparently only too keen on. Jeff Lynne, the other Wilbury who was brought in to supervise the development of Lennon’s demo into a record fit for 1995, describes his thrilled reaction when he first heard Lennon’s voice with Harrison and McCartney’s harmonies. “They sit around bantering and they start singing and it’s the Beatles. That’s that sound.” The release of the Anthology in 1995 answered the question that had dogged the record business: can anyone be bigger than the Beatles? Apparently the Beatles could. In the year the CDs came out they made more money for EMI than anyone else. Which was going some for a bunch of out-takes that two years earlier George Martin had claimed were not worth releasing. However at the time they had a following wind: 1995 was also the year of Britpop. Oasis’s big song Wonderwall was inspired by a George Harrison record. Here was a new generation of British bands who all seemed to be agreed on one thing. They would never be as good as the Beatles. Within two years Downing Street was occupied by a prime minister who had grown up playing the guitar and was only too keen to promote the Beatles as being, along with Shakespeare and Dickens, examples of British genius. Anthology moved the Beatles up a gear. Following its release, they belonged to the ages. George Harrison died in 2001, just two years after being the victim of a terrible attack at his house in the early morning. It’s one of the more grisly ironies of the story of the band who gave us All You Need Is Love that their level of fame made two of them targets for murderous attacks. Thirty years after Anthology, Paul and Ringo soldier on, in many ways even more famous than they were in the 60s. All they ever wanted to do, they both say, was play in a band. To watch Paul and George sitting opposite each other working out guitar lines during the recording of Real Love is to see that in their case, “bouncing off each other” was the basis of everything they did, and to further note that like most musicians they would rather play than do anything else at all. Teased by the other two for his work ethic, Paul says, “I liked the Beatles. I liked to work with the Beatles. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I love in life. All that making music.” Later he says, “When you find someone you can talk to, that’s a very special thing. When you find someone you can play music with, it’s really something. Most musicians spend their whole lives looking for the perfect drummer, the perfect bass player, the perfect guitarist. So I felt kind of privileged.” George says it’s a shame that John never had this experience. “The Beatles went through some turbulent times. When we split up, everybody was fed up with each other. Ringo, Paul and I have had the opportunity to get together in a new light and I feel sorry that John wasn’t able to do that. He would have really enjoyed the opportunity to be with us again.” It’s 30 years since George predicted: “The Beatles has become its own thing now. It will go on without us.” This has turned out to be true but may not be giving sufficient credit to the people at Apple Corps whose job it is to make sure the show remains on the road with an ever-rolling stream of films and other Beatle-related amusements. All over the music business the past is the future. While Oasis perform Wonderwall for millions, Abba entertain in effigy and middle-aged boy bands pack stadiums, the Beatles remain the gold standard of the pop past that everybody wishes to share. “It’s the four in conjunction that makes that pot of soup. Take one of the ingredients out and it can be very similar but it doesn’t quite taste the same.”
The Beatles Anthology exclusive behind the scenes with Jools Holland as remastered series with new episode arrives
Three decades after the Fab Four’s history was chronicled in Anthology, there’s now an extra chapter. Theirs is a long and winding road – but an endlessly compelling one.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Because nothing with the Beatles is ever entirely over, 30 years after the three remaining members, Paul, George and Ringo, brought forth their long-threatened Beatles Anthology – an eightpart series of TV documentaries, accompanied by three double CDs of previously unreleased versions of some of their best-known tunes plus, if you were a completist, an enormous book – they are releasing a remastered version. It comes with an additional part nine, made up of footage shot in and around the launch of that Anthology project and featuring the Fab Three, known at the time as “the Threetles”. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of revelation, this film of their reunion provides even more of the one thing Beatles watchers most crave, which is to watch them in the room with each other, just behaving. This will never not be fascinating. Here are three middle-aged men, all at the time over 50, Englishly keen to demonstrate their ordinariness, drinking tea from workmen’s mugs and playing with any toy at hand, while also strongly hinting that decades before, they were bonded for all time by an experience the rest of us cannot possibly understand. “I was 17 in Hamburg,” says George. “By the time I was 23 we had done Sgt Pepper.” Take that, pop stars of today. Like most gentlemen of their generation, born during the Second World War when lips were stiff, they are not natural practitioners of the newly voguish male hug, but they do it. You didn’t catch them collapsing into each other’s arms at the end of marathon performances the way bands do today. “This was partly because they were rarely on for more than half an hour, and partly because Brian Epstein had instructed them in the importance of announcing the show’s end by forming up and executing a smart bow from the waist. A montage shows them performing this same signature move at the end of shows in front of everyone from stiff royals to demented teens. As a three-piece they can never be entirely back in the groove. The cross-talk act, which they practised at press conferences back in the day, is missing John. Interviewed as a trio on two occasions, at Abbey Road and at George Harrison’s place in Henley, Paul appears guarded in the presence of George, who as the youngest member is always alive to perceived slights. They’re more comfortable when they have something to do with their hands. When they gather at George’s house in the summer of 1994, Paul and George play acoustic guitars, Ringo keeps the volume down by taking up his brushes and they sound like nothing so much as a skiffle group, which is where it all began. For repertoire they reach for the songs that come naturally: Ain’t She Sweet, a hit from the Roaring Twenties, Blue Moon of Kentucky, a bluegrass waltz from the 1940s, and Baby What You Want Me to Do, a Jimmy Reed song that was on the rhythm and blues chart long before they first released a record. That’s the kind of hinterland bands had in those days. When they sit around and talk about the past, it’s the simple things they remember. Combing their hair forwards for the first time, getting their boots at Anello & Davide, getting £100 for John’s birthday, realising after a few hits that they were getting away with it. “It was all accidental really,” says George. “The funny haircuts and jackets and boots. We had something together even if it was just an attitude. You get certain people together and you get fire or dynamite.” Paul looks at a picture of them posing in Edwardian bathing suits on the beach at Weston-super-Mare in 1963 and laughs: “Here they are – the hippest group in history!” View oEmbed on the source website When the three of them sit at the mixing desk while George Martin pulls back the faders to deconstruct the mix of Tomorrow Never Knows, they can’t help being amused by the Heath Robinson nature of many of those sounds. Not for them the reverent silence that attends that ceremony today. They know how this particular sausage was made. “Now it’s serious music,” says Paul, smirking as he recalls the days when they were doing the impossible because nobody had said they couldn’t and it was a bit of a laugh. They all have different memories. Ringo says that if he’d made Anthology it would have been different. Because bands talk about anything but the things that are bothering them, Paul is able to say, “I found out stuff about the other guys I never knew from the Anthology.” The variance in their individual recollections doesn’t just relate to things back in the mists of history. Paul says the idea to make Real Love came from a conversation he had with Yoko Ono in which she said she had an old demo cassette featuring John. George reckons it grew out of the Traveling Wilburys’ plan to “replace” the late Roy Orbison with the voice of Elvis Presley, an idea The King’s estate was apparently only too keen on. Jeff Lynne, the other Wilbury who was brought in to supervise the development of Lennon’s demo into a record fit for 1995, describes his thrilled reaction when he first heard Lennon’s voice with Harrison and McCartney’s harmonies. “They sit around bantering and they start singing and it’s the Beatles. That’s that sound.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2023/12/GettyImages-86111792-f95cd1c.jpg" width="5602" height="3641" alt="From left, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon (1940-1980) and George Harrison (1943-2001) of English rock and pop group The Beatles pose together wearing sandwich boards during a press call to promote their performance of the song 'All You Need Is Love' as part of the 'Our World' worldwide satellite broadcast, at Abbey Road Studios in London, 24th June 1967. The band would perform the song live on a global television link up the next day, 25th June. (Photo by Ivan Keeman/Redferns)" title="The Beatles At Abbey Road" /> The release of the Anthology in 1995 answered the question that had dogged the record business: can anyone be bigger than the Beatles? Apparently the Beatles could. In the year the CDs came out they made more money for EMI than anyone else. Which was going some for a bunch of out-takes that two years earlier George Martin had claimed were not worth releasing. However at the time they had a following wind: 1995 was also the year of Britpop. Oasis’s big song Wonderwall was inspired by a George Harrison record. Here was a new generation of British bands who all seemed to be agreed on one thing. They would never be as good as the Beatles. Within two years Downing Street was occupied by a prime minister who had grown up playing the guitar and was only too keen to promote the Beatles as being, along with Shakespeare and Dickens, examples of British genius. Anthology moved the Beatles up a gear. Following its release, they belonged to the ages. George Harrison died in 2001, just two years after being the victim of a terrible attack at his house in the early morning. It’s one of the more grisly ironies of the story of the band who gave us All You Need Is Love that their level of fame made two of them targets for murderous attacks. Thirty years after Anthology, Paul and Ringo soldier on, in many ways even more famous than they were in the 60s. All they ever wanted to do, they both say, was play in a band. To watch Paul and George sitting opposite each other working out guitar lines during the recording of Real Love is to see that in their case, “bouncing off each other” was the basis of everything they did, and to further note that like most musicians they would rather play than do anything else at all. Teased by the other two for his work ethic, Paul says, “I liked the Beatles. I liked to work with the Beatles. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I love in life. All that making music.” Later he says, “When you find someone you can talk to, that’s a very special thing. When you find someone you can play music with, it’s really something. Most musicians spend their whole lives looking for the perfect drummer, the perfect bass player, the perfect guitarist. So I felt kind of privileged.” George says it’s a shame that John never had this experience. “The Beatles went through some turbulent times. When we split up, everybody was fed up with each other. Ringo, Paul and I have had the opportunity to get together in a new light and I feel sorry that John wasn’t able to do that. He would have really enjoyed the opportunity to be with us again.” It’s 30 years since George predicted: “The Beatles has become its own thing now. It will go on without us.” This has turned out to be true but may not be giving sufficient credit to the people at Apple Corps whose job it is to make sure the show remains on the road with an ever-rolling stream of films and other Beatle-related amusements. All over the music business the past is the future. While Oasis perform Wonderwall for millions, Abba entertain in effigy and middleaged boy bands pack stadiums, the Beatles remain the gold standard of the pop past that everybody wishes to share. Jools Holland: The man who put the questions “It’s a fantastic series because it’s them,” says Jools Holland, who conducted interviews for the TV Anthology in the early 90s. “And now George is no longer here and Neil, who was the fifth Beatle really, is no longer here,” he adds, referring to Neil Aspinall, the group’s personal assistant turned CEO of Apple Corps, who died in 2008. “When we did it, George Harrison said to me, ‘The thing about history is, you can’t actually depend on any of it, because you read about a battle or something that happened 200 years ago and one person says this and another says that. And you’ll see, in this, everybody contradicts each other.’ And [the period they are talking about] was only 20 or so years earlier! “It’s very funny... I’d ask them about a specific thing, like a police inspector, and their evidence was completely contrasting. Remembering when they went to meet Elvis, one would say, ‘Priscilla was there looking wonderful in a black dress, with a sort of veil’ and another one says, ‘Oh yeah, she had a red and white gingham dress’ and the third one says, ‘Yeah, we were hoping to meet Priscilla but sadly she wasn’t there.’ The most important thing about the Beatles is that not only did they make incredible music, they also paved the way for the blueprint of what a band is. They were also really funny. You get a taste of that in a dry, English, Lancashire way. But beneath that gentle, fun side, you open the shirt and there’s a bit of steel. You learn a lot about the stuff they all had to do. And because they’re so matter-of-fact about it, it’s great. If it had been an American band, I think it might have been a tear-fest! “The more you see it the more amazing it is because it’s them talking through what the whole thing was. Also, you realise the greatest things aren’t planned, they fall together. The Rubber Soul cover sums that up. Somebody’s showing them slides so they can pick which one they want as a picture, and the slide player falls, so the slide goes all wonky and longways and they all went, ‘Yeah, yeah, we want it like that.’ A lot of that goes on. “I think it’s still the most incredible work about them, because it’s their film and they’re being honest about it.” MARK BRAXTON Read more: Jools Holland on walking back to New Orleans, breaking down barriers and one very big bang The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Beatles Anthology will begin streaming on Disney+ with a staggered release schedule. Episodes 1–3 start streaming Wednesday, 26 November Episodes 4–6 start streaming Thursday, 27 November Episodes 7–9 start streaming Friday, 28 November Check out more of our Audio coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Bruce Springsteen has become something of a national treasure in Britain — but it wasn’t always the case, says David Hepworth
Add When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain to your watchlist I first met Bruce Springsteen one September night in 1984, in a backstage room in Philadelphia. He was delivered to a 20-minute meeting with me and a camera crew from the BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test with all the caution of a spy swap in East Berlin. He and his people were determined that this had to be a low-key reintroduction to the UK. At the time he viewed England as the land of missed opportunity. He had visited London in 1975 and had been so bruised by the way he had been over-sold with the line “at last London is ready for Bruce Springsteen” that he could barely bring himself to think about a return. The Whistle Test documentary, Born in the USA, which came out of our chat that night aired on 22 December 1984 and by February the following year the album of the same name was number one in the UK, from which you may deduce that the re-introduction worked. While it might be an exaggeration to say that I made Bruce Springsteen a star, I don’t think it would be too much to claim that I played a significant role in making him a star in the UK. His management certainly thought so. Impetuosity may be the mark of other rock stars, but Bruce Springsteen is essentially a cautious man. He even wrote a song with that title. His UK tour in 1985 was the first time he played outdoors. It had to be if it was to accommodate a dramatically expanded following in which his original zealots were soon outnumbered by the people who had been attracted by the video in which he danced with Courteney Cox. Brits punched the air, sang of baseball and the county line; in a few particularly distressing cases they even wore bandanas. When I interviewed him again in New York in 1986 he was in no doubt that he now had what you might call a special relationship with his British audience. He had found that British fans, with their long record of having put in the hard yards with the music papers, were more likely to appreciate his determination to reach for all the erogenous zones of rock and roll, past as well as present. On that occasion he repaid the compliment by facing the camera in a T-shirt advertising a legendary British motorcycle. At that time he was briefly in the cross-hairs of the celebrity magazines, having married the model Julianne Phillips. Six years later, when I interviewed him in Los Angeles, which was now his home, he had started a family with fellow musician Patti Scialfa and in answer to the obvious question said yes, he had undergone therapy. Here he had presumably discovered that it was good to talk. On that occasion he talked at such length that I had to tell him that I had enough, which would have been inconceivable ten years earlier. His manager asked afterwards if I was sure I’d got enough as Bruce had planned to take me for a drive. The fact that this didn’t happen remains one of my professional regrets. Three years after that, when I visited him at the Brixton Academy, he said that nowadays his visits to London were as likely to be filled with trips with the kids to the Natural History Museum as the standard nightspots. I never dreamed that 40 years later, those Whistle Test interviews would remain readily accessible in a million fragments on something called YouTube, or that in 2025 I would be interviewed in a moodily-lit Dalston warehouse for a BBC documentary in which he reflected on that apparently doomed first visit and his special relationship with the UK. Being a member of the American generation whose whole life was turned around by seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show 60 years earlier and just one of the thousands of teenagers who formed themselves into bands after the inspiring example of the Rolling Stones and the Animals, Springsteen has always felt he owed a special debt to the idiosyncratic island across the great ocean. When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain is the story of how he came to repay it.
David Hepworth mourns the record token in his festive column, before sharing RT's pick of the pods — including the outstanding documentary on America's political divide.
Of all the features of Christmas Past, from merry gentlemen to chestnuts roasting on an open fire, from Bing Crosby in the AM to the Queen in the PM, there is none whose passing I mourn half as much as that of the humble record token. Regardless of the merits of the illustration on the outside or the value of the stamp affixed to the inside, did ever a small card purchased in your local high street bring so much pleasure into the average home? The prospect of spending it the minute the shops re-opened carried me through many a desolate Boxing Day. The record token was the teenager’s delight and the trusted fall-back position for every aunt. It guaranteed that at least once a year more or less everybody went to a record shop, many of which opened early to catch “the token trade”. Give the gift of music, as the marketing campaign used to say, and people did. Those days are no more. With most music consumed via a stream, how can you? The physical act is gone. You can’t see yourself decanting a new album into your nephew’s smartphone, can you? That’s a chilly prospect. It’s to be hoped the book trade doesn’t shoot itself in the same foot as the record business did. A hardback book is still a valued and soulful thing to hand someone at this time of year. No matter how hot the market for audiobooks gets, it will curl up and die without the reminder of the tomes to which they owe their life. I’ve nothing against audiobooks. I’m currently enjoying A Voyage around The Queen by Craig Brown, thoughtfully produced using the voices of both Harriet Walter and the author. How much better it would be if the purchase of the book included access to the audio and the Kindle version as well. That way, I would have had more opportunities to get through the book, I would have finished it more quickly and would already be on to a second book – and waiting to unwrap more from under the tree. Merry Christmas! SOCIETY We Live Here Now — RT Podcast of the Year View oEmbed on the source website A nuanced doc about what unfolded when a hardcore Make America Great Again family, whose lives had been changed by the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol, moved into a liberal Washington suburb. DAVID HEPWORTH CRIME Buried: The Last Witness View oEmbed on the source website If the first series of Buried, with its exposé of organised crime gangs illegally dumping waste, was alarming, then the second series is terrifying, as it details the disturbing legacy of toxic chemicals dumped from the 1960s onwards. CRIME To Catch a Scorpion View oEmbed on the source website This gripping series made headlines for tracking down Scorpion, the head of an international people-smuggling gang. It’s remarkable also for the banter, in risky situations, between courageous reporters Sue Mitchell and Rob Lawrie. RELATIONSHIPS The Arc of Love View oEmbed on the source website This eight-episode limited series from Esther Perel (of Where Should We Begin? fame) reflects on different stages of relationships; the promise of young love, the betrayal of affairs, the despair of a partner’s death, and the conclusion of a happy divorce. SOCIETY A Muslim and a Jew Go There View oEmbed on the source website This podcast, with Baroness Warsi (Muslim) and David Baddiel (Jew) came along in February, when there was never a more important time to confront the thorny issues surrounding Judaism, Islam, Israel and Palestine. DRAMA Central Intelligence View oEmbed on the source website Kim Cattrall, Ed Harris and Johnny Flynn bring star power to this classy dramatisation of the history of the CIA. It’s told with the use of declassified documents and from the refreshing point of view of analyst Eloise Page, who became the agency’s highest- ranked female officer. SPACE 16 Sunsets View oEmbed on the source website The team behind the BBC’s award-winning 13 Minutes to the Moon return, floating in podcast space with a crowd-funded, independent production about Nasa’s space shuttle programme, presented by the enthusiastic Kevin Fong.The sound design is superb. COMEDY Frank off the Radio View oEmbed on the source website Frank Skinner has had a successful poetry podcast for years. So it was natural that when he was dumped by Absolute, he shifted his radio show into a podcast that carries the same rambling charm, if not the music. LITERATURE Sherlock & Co View oEmbed on the source website Each generation has its own Sherlock Holmes. Gen Z’s is this zippy series, in which Dr Watson is a true-crime podcaster. As they work through Doyle’s stories, the enjoyable dialogue switches between Watson’s loose-limbed podcast reflections and the taut deductions of Holmes. REVIEWS BY DAVID CRAWFORD
In 1984, Sir Bob Geldof was roused to action by a news report on the Ethiopian famine. Forty years later, he’s still amazed Band Aid came together…
Add The Making of Do They Know It's Christmas? to your watchlist At the time of the first Band Aid recording in 1984, I was one of the presenters of BBC rock show Whistle Test. When the producer told me to be at a Notting Hill recording studio on Sunday morning because “apparently Bob Geldof’s making some kind of charity record”, it was said with a look we now call “side-eye”. The stock of the Boomtown Rats singer was not high. Forty years later, Geldof admits his second career might never have started had the first not foundered so badly. Their 1984 album had not troubled the chart. At the close of a gloomy October day spent trying unsuccessfully to interest anyone in their new single and, “thinking the best part of my life might be over”, he slunk home early to his girlfriend Paula Yates and their young child. “That’s how I saw Michael Buerk’s report about the Ethiopian famine on the Six o’Clock News,” he explains. “Le Bon and Boy George and Bono and the rest of them would have been out being rock stars. I wasn’t. I was on my sofa.” Galvanised by what he saw, he conceived the idea of a fund-raising single, plundering the family’s phone book for top pop names to sing on it. “Although they had pushed our lot aside, I knew all these people through Paula and The Tube [the Channel 4 music show she presented]. I’ve got Polaroids of people like Simon Le Bon at my place, asleep on the sitting room floor because they were just exhausted.” The song Do They Know It’s Christmas? was arrived at by putting together a pre-existing Midge Ure composition with a fragment of a song Geldof had failed to interest the Rats in. “Midge sent me the tune and I said, ‘Dude, that’s f***ing Z Cars.’ He said, ‘Better than anything you can write.’ Midge will grudgingly admit there may also be an element of The Dam Busters there.” It proved serviceable. A new BBC documentary of how it came to be recorded, put together from footage shot on the day that has lain in a vault ever since, begins with Geldof and Ure waiting like nervous party hosts to see who turns up first. “Midge said to me, ‘Who’s coming?’ I said, ‘Oh, everyone,’ but still I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think Spandau would come back from Japan. Why would you?” By the time I arrived that day, Sting, Paul Weller and Spandau Ballet were already there. By mid-morning, the faces were rolling in so freely that you stopped taking note. Boy George made his big entrance in the evening, having flown in from New York on Concorde. Such were the times. Four years earlier, most of the oiks in that room wouldn’t have been able to scrape the price of a cab; now here they were in front of the cameras, savouring their moment, doing their bit, feeling their juice, not entirely sure where they were. Geldof can’t be sure of the name of the bewildered band member who recorded a message apologising to “all our Ethiopian fans” for not being able to tour there, so he must remain the day’s Unknown Soldier. The pop historian in Geldof is captivated by the film, likening it to the Maysles brothers’ famous footage of the Beatles arriving in New York in 1964. “There’s no filter. What I love about it is the contrast with We Are the World [the US equivalent recorded the following year]. There you have these giants, people like Ray Charles, Tina Turner and Willie Nelson, but back in the UK there are these spotty kids just out of school. They’re charming, guileless, innocent almost. They’re rivals for sure, but they’re laughing and carrying on. Then you have a previous generation, like me and Weller and Midge trying to keep it together. Everyone crowds into the studio control room, which is the very opposite of Quincy Jones, let me assure you. It’s wonderful, it’s moving and no one in that room, me included, had a clue what was coming next.” There are aspects of the day Geldof has forgotten or didn’t notice back then. Paul Weller, at the time in his Style Council phase, arrived sporting a walking stick. “I imagined he and I hadn’t got along, but in the film I can see him sitting behind Midge, chipping in.” He’s forgotten that he phoned Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who were overseas, to beg even the tiniest contribution from the year’s hot property. The sequence where he’s heard introducing a visibly nervous Bono (“He wasn’t sure U2 should be there at all, and he was iffy about Le Bon’s bouffant”) to a clearly shy George Michael (who says, “I get nervous around pop stars,” before transforming his vocal line with an artful tweak) has a touch of Stella Street. “It’s mad in retrospect. Two years later these people were the determinants of pop music all over the world.” The world outside the window of Sarm Studios remains distinctly 1984. Holland Park looks shabby, the reporters use notepads, people smoke, calls are made on rotary dial phones and nobody asks why the chorus contains only four women. “It has to be seen in the context of its times,” he says. “You don’t get Band Aid without Loadsamoney [Harry Enfield’s 80s comedy character].” The soloists line up to record their lines in front of each other. These are done “dry”, meaning nobody else can hear the track they’re singing to. Under such conditions, even Pavarotti would sound like a drunk. “It was like school. ‘Who’s going first?’ ‘Not me, f*** off.’ Midge was like the kindly teacher and I was there tapping my fingers impatiently. Anyway, Paul Young stepped up and volunteered to do the first line.” Bob is seen reminding them what they’re singing about. “Bono took me aside and asked if I was sure I wanted him to sing this line about ‘Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you.’ I was able to say, this is not soggy liberalism; this is coded anger, like Michael Buerk’s report. And because he’s got a voice from God and he can absorb the sense of a song like few others, he nailed it.” In time, Bono’s bravura delivery of that zinger attracted a fan club. When, on its 20th anniversary, a subsequent generation of pop stars gathered to record the song, both Robbie Williams and Justin Hawkins tried to bag the line for themselves. “They were still arguing when the door swings open and in walks Bono, who says, ‘Are we doing my line yet?’ He came back and sang it again in 2014, when we were doing it for the Ebola crisis.” What the film can’t capture is the behind-the-scenes arm wrestling of the week between completion and release, during the course of which Geldof learnt to go to the top. “I did a deal with the Daily Mirror by calling [owner] Robert Maxwell. The old shyster rang me at 3am, saying he was going to charge for the poster of the Band Aid line-up. I told him he couldn’t. When Top of the Pops said they couldn’t play the record because it wasn’t yet in the charts, I went to [BBC1 controller] Michael Grade. He said, ‘Why don’t I give you five minutes before Top of the Pops? Can you get someone to introduce it?’ I said, ‘I could f***ing do that,’ and he said, ‘Mmm, perhaps somebody else, Bob.’” Anyway, David Bowie did it. I asked him to wear my Feed the World T-shirt, which was based on Katharine Hamnett’s [designer T-shirts]. Of course, it looked s**t on me and brilliant on him. “I was having difficulty getting the Musicians’ Union to sign off on all these people being present. I’d come to the end of my tether. The only way to get it to Radio 1 was to leave the MU and start our own union. If we started the Pop Music Union, left the MU and said to the BBC, ‘You can play none of these artists’ records without the PMU’s consent,’ it would have meant that Radio 1 would have come off air. I understood the power that was in that room.” The union settled; the Geldof MO was established. As we wind up, I remind him that 40 years earlier, I had asked if this would be the end of his involvement with charity – he said yes. He laughs. His morning has begun, as most days do, with ten emails of Band Aid Trust-related matters. “But if you asked me again today, the answer would be the same.” 'It was extraordinary' Mark Ellen was editor of Smash Hits magazine and attended the 1984 recording. He recalls shy stars and one surprising ice-breaker… Did you think Band Aid would be successful? I admit I initially felt a bit sceptical. Bob Geldof hadn’t had a hit for four years and was generally considered, in Smash Hits parlance, “down the dumper”. But he had the gift of the gab, he was a brilliant negotiator, and he was a bridge between the older artists — Status Quo, Genesis — and the younger ones, like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, who he knew through his then girlfriend, Paula Yates. How did the artists behave on the day? Pop stars back then were rivals who slagged each other off in the press. Paul Weller hid behind me, saying, “I’m hardly everyone’s favourite person.” People initially kept themselves busy, so they didn’t have to talk — John Taylor was eating chilli con carne Bananarama were watching TV. The ice breaker was Culture Club drummer Jon Moss, who saw Phil Collins, shouted “My hero!” and ran over and hugged him. Who was the biggest star in the room? Boy George. He was stuck in New York, but Bob called him and he flew in on Concorde. Eventually, he arrived, with crimson hair. He was the biggest household name at the time, the one everyone’s mum knew. Had he not turned up, the record would have had far less impact. What happened when they began to sing? They recorded the chorus first, then each vocalist had to step up in turn and deliver their lines. It must have been nerve-racking, trying to cram all your vocal personality into five seconds. But, somehow, they all managed it. Forty years later, how do you feel about Band Aid? Now there’s a convention of stars doing charity singles, which Band Aid started. At the time, seeing all those famous faces together in one room was extraordinary. I’ve always felt very proud that it was British, and the rest of the world followed. It felt quite out of step with the individualistic 1980s. Band Aid was a rare moment, when people stopped and looked around. I’m not sure how long it lasted, but it was wonderful. 'It was like a Navy Seals operation' Mariella Frostrup then one of Band Aid’s PR team, remembers a sense of reverence on the day, and the moment she knew it had worked… How did you come to work on Band Aid? Bob was one of my clients. He came into Phonogram Records and tried to take over my desk. He’d seen a news item on TV and it had reduced him to tears. He said he had something important to do and didn’t have a moment to waste. What was your role? My job was to help coordinate all the big bands and big egos. It was like a Navy Seals operation in terms of how to present it to the media. Back then, every call was on a landline, every press release sent by fax, and you had to rewrite from scratch anything with a mistake. The amount of manual labour was not inconsiderable! What is your strongest memory of recording day? I was very used to those bands joshing around, but there was a kind of reverential silence as they all slipped into the studio — extraordinary when you’re talking about a bunch of young, scampy, egotistical people. It felt as though something important was going on, and the ones who turned up in limousines seemed pretty embarrassed. I think they soon realised it wasn’t just another showbusiness gig. It felt part of something bigger. When did you first realise what a phenomenon it would become? I walked down Oxford Street the day the single came out and heard it playing in almost every shop I passed. Then it went to number one, and just flew. Forty years later, how do you feel about Band Aid? The lyrics, especially Bono’s line, encapsulated Bob and Midge’s sense of rage, and determination that we should all get off our well-padded bottoms and do something. Sadly, that remains true today. The world hasn’t changed as dramatically as we’d have liked it to, and we’re cynical about the people who try. People find Bob a bit Marmite, but he started a global movement and raised millions for a cause he believed in. I still get shivers down my spine when I hear the original.
Band Aid at 40: Bob Geldof recalls the iconic charity single's chaotic creation
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. At the time of the first Band Aid recording in 1984, I was one of the presenters of BBC rock show Whistle Test. When the producer told me to be at a Notting Hill recording studio on Sunday morning because "apparently Bob Geldof's making some kind of charity record", it was said with a look we now call "side-eye". The stock of the Boomtown Rats singer was not high. Forty years later, Geldof admits his second career might never have started had the first not foundered so badly. Their 1984 album had not troubled the chart. At the close of a gloomy October day spent trying unsuccessfully to interest anyone in their new single and, "thinking the best part of my life might be over", he slunk home early to his girlfriend Paula Yates and their young child. "That's how I saw Michael Buerk's report about the Ethiopian famine on the six o'clock news," he explains. "Le Bon and Boy George and Bono and the rest of them would have been out being rock stars. I wasn't. I was on my sofa." Galvanised by what he saw, he conceived the idea of a fund-raising single, plundering the family's phone book for top pop names to sing on it. "Although they had pushed our lot aside, I knew all these people through Paula and The Tube [the Channel 4 music show she presented]. I’ve got Polaroids of people like Simon Le Bon at my place, asleep on the sitting room floor because they were just exhausted." The song Do They Know It's Christmas? was arrived at by putting together a pre-existing Midge Ure composition with a fragment of a song Geldof had failed to interest the Rats in. "Midge sent me the tune and I said, 'Dude, that's f**king Z Cars.' He said, 'Better than anything you can write.' Midge will grudgingly admit there may also be an element of The Dam Busters there." It proved serviceable. A new BBC documentary of how it came to be recorded, put together from footage shot on the day that has lain in a vault ever since, begins with Geldof and Ure waiting like nervous party hosts to see who turns up first. "Midge said to me, 'Who's coming?' I said, 'Oh, everyone,' but still I wasn't sure. I didn't think Spandau would come back from Japan. Why would you?" By the time I arrived that day, Sting, Paul Weller and Spandau Ballet were already there. By mid-morning, the faces were rolling in so freely that you stopped taking note. Boy George made his big entrance in the evening, having flown in from New York on Concorde. Such were the times. Four years earlier, most of the oiks in that room wouldn't have been able to scrape the price of a cab; now here they were in front of the cameras, savouring their moment, doing their bit, feeling their juice, not entirely sure where they were. Geldof can’t be sure of the name of the bewildered band member who recorded a message apologising to "all our Ethiopian fans" for not being able to tour there, so he must remain the day's Unknown Soldier. The pop historian in Geldof is captivated by the film, likening it to the Maysles brothers' famous footage of the Beatles arriving in New York in 1964. "There's no filter. What I love about it is the contrast with We Are the World [the US equivalent recorded the following year]. There you have these giants, people like Ray Charles, Tina Turner and Willie Nelson, but back in the UK there are these spotty kids just out of school. They’re charming, guileless, innocent almost. They’re rivals for sure, but they're laughing and carrying on. "Then you have a previous generation, like me and Weller and Midge trying to keep it together. Everyone crowds into the studio control room, which is the very opposite of Quincy Jones, let me assure you. It's wonderful, it’s moving and no one in that room, me included, had a clue what was coming next." There are aspects of the day Geldof has forgotten or didn't notice back then. Paul Weller, at the time in his Style Council phase, arrived sporting a walking stick. "I imagined he and I hadn’t got along, but in the film I can see him sitting behind Midge, chipping in." He's forgotten that he phoned Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who were overseas, to beg even the tiniest contribution from the year’s hot property. The sequence where he's heard introducing a visibly nervous Bono ("He wasn't sure U2 should be there at all, and he was iffy about Le Bon's bouffant") to a clearly shy George Michael (who says, "I get nervous around pop stars," before transforming his vocal line with an artful tweak) has a touch of Stella Street. "It's mad in retrospect. Two years later these people were the determinants of pop music all over the world." The world outside the window of Sarm Studios remains distinctly 1984. Holland Park looks shabby, the reporters use notepads, people smoke, calls are made on rotary dial phones and nobody asks why the chorus contains only four women. "It has to be seen in the context of its times," he says. "You don't get Band Aid without Loadsamoney [Harry Enfield's '80s comedy character]." The soloists line up to record their lines in front of each other. These are done "dry", meaning nobody else can hear the track they’re singing to. Under such conditions, even Pavarotti would sound like a drunk. "It was like school. ‘Who’s going first?’ ‘Not me, f**k off.’ Midge was like the kindly teacher and I was there tapping my fingers impatiently. Anyway, Paul Young stepped up and volunteered to do the first line." Bob is seen reminding them what they’re singing about. “Bono took me aside and asked if I was sure I wanted him to sing this line about ‘Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you.’ I was able to say, this is not soggy liberalism; this is coded anger, like Michael Buerk’s report. And because he’s got a voice from God and he can absorb the sense of a song like few others, he nailed it.” In time, Bono's bravura delivery of that zinger attracted a fan club. When, on its 20th anniversary, a subsequent generation of pop stars gathered to record the song, both Robbie Williams and Justin Hawkins tried to bag the line for themselves. "They were still arguing when the door swings open and in walks Bono, who says, 'Are we doing my line yet?' He came back and sang it again in 2014, when we were doing it for the Ebola crisis." What the film can't capture is the behind-the-scenes arm wrestling of the week between completion and release, during the course of which Geldof learnt to go to the top. "I did a deal with the Daily Mirror by calling [owner] Robert Maxwell. The old shyster rang me at 3am, saying he was going to charge for the poster of the Band Aid line-up. I told him he couldn’t. When Top of the Pops said they couldn’t play the record because it wasn’t yet in the charts, I went to [BBC1 controller] Michael Grade. He said, 'Why don't I give you five minutes before Top of the Pops? Can you get someone to introduce it?’ I said, ‘I could f**king do that,’ and he said, 'Mmm, perhaps somebody else, Bob.'" Anyway, David Bowie did it. I asked him to wear my Feed the World T-shirt, which was based on Katharine Hamnett's [designer T-shirts]. Of course, it looked s**t on me and brilliant on him. "I was having difficulty getting the Musicians' Union to sign off on all these people being present. I'd come to the end of my tether. The only way to get it to Radio 1 was to leave the MU and start our own union. If we started the Pop Music Union, left the MU and said to the BBC, 'You can play none of these artists' records without the PMU’s consent,’ it would have meant that Radio 1 would have come off air. I understood the power that was in that room." The union settled; the Geldof MO was established. As we wind up, I remind him that 40 years earlier, I had asked if this would be the end of his involvement with charity – he said yes. He laughs. His morning has begun, as most days do, with 10 emails of Band Aid Trust-related matters. "But if you asked me again today, the answer would be the same." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
How the last ever song by The Beatles came together
The Fab Four split in 1970, but now something remarkable is happening – the release of a new Beatles song.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. In the winter of 1964, Derek Taylor, first and greatest of the spin doctors of pop, was engaged to write the sleeve notes of the Beatles' fourth album, Beatles for Sale. In this, he offered a prediction. He said it was inevitable that generations not yet born when he was typing would, at some point in the future, wish to understand the fuss about the Beatles. Faced with this question, he advised against trying to explain about the hair or the screams. Instead, he said we should simply play them the records and "the kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of wellbeing and warmth as we do today". Now, the kids of AD 2000 have kids of their own, but Derek Taylor's words hold true, even if they only tell half the story. What Taylor couldn't have been expected to foresee is just how much people far in the future would still yearn for that "sense of wellbeing and warmth". Like a benign inherited condition, Beatlemania has been passed down the decades since, assisted by judicious nudges from marketing, facilitated by advances in technology and informed by a weather eye on the changes in public taste. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2023/11/GettyImages-1281862281-e68eacd.jpg" width="2353" height="1569" alt="Derek Taylor, the Beatles' Publicist for the US, is seen in 1968 recording his weekly radio show at KRLA in Pasadena, CA. His wit, charm, style and intense focus are in plain view. He is wearing his signature silk scarf, a Mickey Mouse watch, and an embroidered Nehru jacket. Two employees of KRLA are also seen here, along with two disc jockeys, the latter one pictured is "Reb 'The Rebel' Foster. (Photos by Sulfiati Magnuson/Getty Images.)" title="Derek Taylor, the Beatles' Publicist for the US, is seen in 1968 recording his weekly radio show at KRLA in Pasadena, CA. His wit, charm, style and intense focus are in plain view. He is wearing his signature silk scarf, a Mickey Mouse watch, and an embroidered Nehru jacket. Two employees of KRLA are also seen here, along with two disc jockeys, the latter one pictured is "Reb 'The Rebel' Foster. (Photos by Sulfiati Magnuson/Getty Images.)" /> If you grew up in the '60s - if you were, so to speak, a Fabs OG - you probably counted out your adolescence in Beatles 45s, the precise order of which are as engraved in your memory as the birth order of your own children. If you were a teenager in the '70s, you probably know the band through the prism of mum and dad's copies of the Red and Blue double albums, which stood sentinel alongside so many music centres with their smoked-glass lids. For the Smash Hits generation of the '80s, the death of John Lennon brought the realisation that the Double Fantasy chap had once been in a group with the leader of Wings and the further realisation that this group sometimes sounded a bit like ELO. When Britpop arrived in the '90s, it came not so much to bury the Fabs’ legacy as to raise it to new heights. Around the same time, the remaining "Threatles" told their story in their own way via the TV mini-series Anthology and its accompanying DVDs and compilation albums. At the turn of the millennium, at the cresting of the CD boom, they released 1, another compilation album, which has sold more than 31 million copies and remains the only CD that most people under the age of 25 can remember. Six years after that, original Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his son Giles were tasked with producing a "mash-up" of old Beatles recordings for a Las Vegas show called Love, to be performed by Cirque du Soleil. Giles Martin recalls thinking it wasn't all that good an idea, so he decided to make sure his work wasn't wasted by backing up all the original Beatles tapes and making musical notes about each of the original recordings. Almost 17 years later, Love is still running in Las Vegas with no end in sight, the business of the Beatles is still being run from a smart townhouse in Knightsbridge and Giles Martin is still working on new releases bearing the Beatles name. The most recent is Now and Then. This was one of the John Lennon demos that Yoko Ono handed over in 1994 when Anthology was being made. The others were Free as a Bird and Real Love. At the time, the technology wasn't up to the task of separating Lennon's voice from his piano accompaniment, so Now and Then was abandoned and, says McCartney, "left to languish in a cupboard". There it would have remained, had it not been for McCartney's work ethic. Having been impressed by how director Peter Jackson had managed to isolate all the individual voices from the mono tape recordings that went into his epic Beatles documentary series Get Back, he wondered if Jackson's machine assisted learning technology might do the same with this dusty cassette. It turned out that it could. "There it was, John's voice, crystal clear," says McCartney in a short film made to mark the release. "It's quite emotional." Hence the record they're calling "the last Beatles song". It's always Paul. Ringo often reflects that the Beatles only made the number of records they did because Paul was always on the phone. It's little different 60 years later. Ringo says: "He called me up and said he'd like to work on Now and Then, what do you think? I think it's great. So he put the bass on, he sent the files to me, I put the drums on. It was the closest we'll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know. It's far out." All statements from Planet Beatle are careful to reflect the views of all four principals. George Harrison's widow Olivia says she has no doubt that her husband would have wholeheartedly supported the project, while John Lennon’s son Sean said "it's like a time capsule and all feels very meant to be". But still the key Beatles fan is Paul. "We all play on it, it's a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven't heard, I think it's an exciting thing. How lucky was I to have those men in my life and to work with those men so intimately and to come up with such a body of music." The final piece of the puzzle is a video for Now and Then, directed by Peter Jackson; his first pop promo is an unashamed piece of fan fiction, in the timeless new dimension of hyper-reality. Giles Martin remains more concerned with the sound than the pictures. "I thought it was really important that it sounds like the Beatles, and the Beatles would have put some backing vocals on it. But they're not there any more. So, I went through my notes. An 'oooh' is an 'oooh', and there are lots on Because and Here, There and Everywhere, so we used some of them." The 21 tracks that have been added to the 50th anniversary reissue of the Red and Blue albums were chosen with a view to redressing a previous imbalance between Lennon/McCartney and George Harrison songs. The inclusion of the likes of Tomorrow Never Knows, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Dear Prudence and I Want You (She’s So Heavy) reflects the trippier music favoured by today's Beatles streamers. "The Red and Blue albums were the first Beatles albums I really knew," says Martin, who was born in 1969, the year his father produced Abbey Road and the Beatles began to wind up. "I went on a ski trip when I was about 10, and a mate of mine had the cassettes, so we pretended to be ill and listened to those." On these, the first reissues in what was then a novel technology called "stereo", the sound of the band was all in the left channel with the vocals over in the right. This neither did justice to the bracing whomp of the original mono singles nor matched the deep-pile sound of other 1973 releases like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Martin is pleased that today's technology doesn't merely allow the drums to be extracted from the original tape. "You can also de-mix the de-mix so that you have the different parts of the drum kit on separate tracks," he explains. "On Nowhere Man you can have the harmonies in stereo. I end up replaying Ringo's drums through a speaker on the floor of Studio Two at Abbey Road, then re-recording them. That's very eerie, if you go in the control room and the Beatles are playing downstairs." No matter what the song says, there’s no getting back. In the '60s, all pop music sounded best at a fairground, where you could feel the bass. In the '70s, Abbey Road became everyone's favourite Beatles album because you could play it alongside Fleetwood Mac. In the '80s, people listening to Beatles CDs were thrilled by the absence of scratches. From the '90s, most music was accessed on headphones. At each stage, we have listened in a different way while kidding ourselves it's the same. Read more: The Beatles' last ever song confirms November release date BBC Two and iPlayer announce The Beatles celebration night In 2011, Giles Martin was hired to mix the sound for Martin Scorsese's documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. "I was fired because they said, 'Marty doesn't like your revisionist approach to music.' Four weeks later, I was called back. I met Marty in a studio, we set up the film and I switched between my mix and the original. "He said he preferred my mix and he couldn't understand why. I said it's because it's never how you remember it being. Our brains adjust. We don't really listen to these things. We recreate them in our heads. My job is to mix a song so that it's how people remember it." The real target audience, who are people like Giles Martin's teenage daughter, have no such memories to contend with. "I drive teenage girls around and I say, 'What's your favourite band?' and they say, 'They're called Fleetwood Mac – I don't know if you've heard of them'. "My daughter recently went on holiday with [actor] Dominic West's family, who are all massive Beatles fans. They were listening to Here, There and Everywhere. She was able to come back and say, 'Dad, I actually like the Beatles!'" Seems like Derek Taylor was right. View Green Video on the source website If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10 – subscribe now and celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who with a special issue of Radio Times. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Melvyn Bragg looks back on 20 years of In Our Time on Radio 4
The veteran broadcaster explains how he keeps the academics 'on their toes' on subjects ranging from the Abbasid Caliphs to the Zulu Nation
Barbara Graziosi is a rising star of academia. She has just been appointed Professor of Classics at Princeton University in the United States. On the day she was supposed to start teaching she excused herself on the grounds that she had been invited to make her first appearance on Radio 4’s In Our Time. Getting the call from In Our Time isn’t quite like being picked to play for your country, but you don’t turn it down. Her bosses understood. Don’t worry about the students, they said. They, too, will understand. Sara Cox had the best response to Zoe Ball being named the new BBC Radio 2 breakfast show presenter Chris Evans called his mum for advice on how to respond to BBC pay backlash RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox They’ll understand, because some of them will hear the In Our Time podcast, or as host Melvyn Bragg is given to calling it in fogeyish moments, “the iPod”. It’s the podcast of In Our Time that’s turned what was always a respected part of the Radio 4 offering into one of its stars. This weekly discussion about the history of ideas is now listened to by an average of two million on the radio and it’s reckoned to reach a further million as a podcast. Many of the podcast listeners are younger than the average Radio 4 listener, and many are overseas. View oEmbed on the source website It’s done this without resorting to any of the tricks programmes traditionally employ to get into the good graces of younger audiences. If anything, In Our Time goes the other way. Indeed, when one of Barbara Graziosi’s fellow panellists, who are gathered to talk about The Iliad, compares the politics of ancient Greece with Theresa May’s government, Bragg says, “That won’t do,” with that touch of asperity that 20 years as the host entitles him to. “‘Never knowingly relevant’ is one of our mottoes!” The guests’ involvement with the programme begins with the usual phone call from producer Victoria Brignell, who grills them each for an hour about what they want to say. Victoria then distils the conversations with the academics into 30 pages of notes that go to Bragg on Friday. He goes through these and sometimes does some further reading round the subject. “Usually I don’t know what the next subject is until the week before,” he says. “I like not knowing. Mind you, when it’s Middlemarch I prefer a bit of warning.” In the week of the broadcasts he, Brignell and fellow producer Simon Tillotson bat ideas back and forth until a running order is arrived at. His intro to the week’s subject, which can be anything from the Abbasid Caliphs to the Zulu Nation, is scripted, then it’s into the questions, each of which is directed at a guest who has a fair idea it’s coming. They cannot be certain, however. Bragg likes to keep them on their toes. He doesn’t use all the questions and will skip back and forth through the running order. The programme usually goes out live, therefore he has to have one eye on the clock at all times. His aim is to land safely at 9.45am leaving the listener feeling they know more than they did at 9am and his guests feeling that they didn’t have it all their own way. Although academics are a voluble breed who rarely run out of things to say, Bragg’s ringmastering of this weekly circus is impressive. Then again, it’s his train set and they know it. At 9.45am, when they are off air, he asks, “Is there anything we missed?” and they weigh in. This conversation, which has a much more relaxed flavour, is recorded and included in the podcast. It was a fellow peer of Baron Bragg’s who first suggested he’d like to hear that. The producer at the time wasn’t sure he’d be able to get such an innovation past the people upstairs. Bragg, who thinks it better to ask forgiveness than permission, suggested just doing it. They just did it. They’ve done it ever since. Every week Bragg is accosted wherever he goes by fans of the programme. The latest included the Australian bloke who stopped him in Soho to say it was his favourite programme, and the Governor of the Bank of England, whose enthusiasm for it is “almost embarrassing”. Why is it suddenly so popular? “I think we’re a more serious country,” Bragg says. “I’ve been going to literary festivals since the late 60s. Back then a few hundred people turned up. Now it’s thousands. Also I think listening has caught on again. Now that millions of people have gone to university – but have focused on a couple of subjects – the idea of getting a spread of knowledge is attractive.” There’s something of the old-fashioned grammar-school teacher about Bragg on In Our Time. He has great respect for the knowledge of the three dons across the table, but he can turn chilly if he feels they’re not pulling their weight. He’s not above encouraging a little mischief, but he can switch in a moment to sounding slightly disappointed that people are not coming up to the standards he expects. In Our Time has remained largely unchanged since it began in October 1998. Given the programme’s popularity among the chattering classes, he must have been presented with many suggestions about how it might be improved? “Yes, but I didn’t think much of them, so we haven’t introduced them.” What sort of suggestions? “I’m not going to tell, because they’re so awful,” he announces. Then he twinkles. In Our Time airs on Thursdays at 9am on BBC Radio 4