- Episodes available on 2025-11-30
- Episodes available on 2025-11-29
- Episodes available on 2025-11-28
- Episodes available on 2025-11-27
- The Beatles Anthology - Season 1 - Episode 1 July 40 to March 63 (The Beatles Anthology 1x01)This is the scarcely credible beginning of the Great Adventure, going back, back, back into a great war in a grey time that seems to belong to other beings in other worlds. Britain under Hitlers bombs, boys not yet Beatles struggling for a place in the sun. Wonderful archive of yesterdays enemy seaports now united by primitive, derivative rocknroll - Hamburg and Liverpool, full of young men scuffling for position and rank, nobody with advantage except for real gifts and those the Beatles had aplenty: wit, music, energy, looks, personality. The good Lord sent them a manager, Brian Epstein, and a producer, George Martin, and so we see how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr influenced by the power of American rnr and r&b used their cheek and confidence and talent to get their first Number One in Britain: Please, Please Me. Wallow in these Black and White beginnings - see how the forties became the fifties became the sixties and discover how becoming the Beatles became.
- The Beatles Anthology - Season 1 - Episode 2 March 63 to February 64 (The Beatles Anthology 1x02)The earth is moving fast beneath their speeding boots. Millions of saloon bar prophets who couldnt tell them apart had to hand it to them: "Theyve got something! From Liverpool, I hear - of all places." From Liverpool uber alles! They leave their Cavern Club in this episode and within months they take the ascendancy in the British pop world, and start to live the life of Riley in London. They play the Palladium, the Royal Albert Hall, The Royal Variety Show, sing Moonlight Bay with Morecambe and Wise, give a spare hit to the Rolling Stones, play hundreds of concerts in Britain, nip over to Sweden, invent Beatlemania, record I Want To Hold Your Hand (their 4th British number one in a year) and as if in a dream - while theyre conquering Paris - the record goes to Number One in America three weeks before the Ed Sullivan Show in New York. If there had been no Beatles, no-one would have had the imagination to invent such a story.
- The Beatles Anthology - Season 1 - Episode 3 February 64 to July 64 (The Beatles Anthology 1x03)This was still a time of wonderment on both sides of the equation. The world couldnt believe this magnificent four-headed creation could continue to be so delightfully entertaining and impudent and the creature couldnt believe the world could be so nice. Wherever they went now, first America, then Europe, the Far East and Australasia, and back to Liverpool for the special local premiere of A Hard Days Night, they brought Beatlemania with them. They couldnt help it; it was a form of real love. George would say many years later that the world used them as an excuse to go mad and then blamed it on the Beatles, but there is a parallel theory that it was time for the world to go that sort of mad - get down a bit, loosen up, and, like Uncle John in Long Tall Sally, have some fun tonight. The crowd scenes in this segment are awesome and , in retrospect awful. How did no-one get killed? The bloom of success was still fresh in the story herein.
- The Beatles Anthology - Season 1 - Episode 4 August 64 to August 65 (The Beatles Anthology 1x04)Success, well earned, in the struggles for recognition, is now assumed as a natural state. All the records are number one, both singles and albums and educated America is now in thrall to them. The Beatles sweep through the great US cities, drawing tens of thousands to airports for the merest glimpse. They play for now more than half an hour per concert. A Hard Days Night has guaranteed them star status in the cinema and they laughed their way through Help! in Technicolor. Paul dreams he has written Yesterday - and has. They are the first group to play a baseball stadium, Shea in New York, breaking records for crowd fever, numbers and good cheer. Oh, and they go to Buckingham Palace to receive medals from the Queen and, by now, more or less accept it as their due. They are, however, as happy and polite as can be. Life is now almost fun, albeit with a strand of stress now slicing through it...
- The Beatles Anthology - Season 1 - Episode 8 July 68 to The End (The Beatles Anthology 1x08)All things must pass, as the man said in this final episode, things are passing strange and fairly fast. The music holds out till the end (as good as gold, as good as ever better even, some might say, bearing in mind the quality of Abbey Road, which ends this stunning story) and the Beatles, having worked through the White album, Let It Be, Hey Jude and Revolution, two weddings, two busts an the rooftop concert equal Gilbert and Sullivan in the level of acrimony and the heightened quality of the work that was done through it and despite it all. The Beatles have survived their success and survived their era to remain modern, timeless and supreme against all comers. Paul, George and Ringo can still sit around a table and relive the twentieth centurys greatest romance. This final tape evades nothing and reveals the rents and splits that ended their 60s life together but it cannot avoid encouraging all of us to believe in magic.
- Episodes available on 2025-11-26
- Episodes available on 2025-11-25
- Episodes available on 2025-11-24