1979 - The Beatles at Christmas
The BBC schedulers were always up for a season of films over the festive season, focusing on the work of a particular artist or director. In 1979, the seasonal spotlight fell on the Fab Four.
Showing a Beatles film over Christmas had become something of a tradition in the first half of the decade, beginning with the 1970 TV premiere of A Hard Day’s Night, on Monday 28 December at 16.05. It was back the following year, this time at 9.40 in the morning, but I saw neither of these broadcasts.
In 1972, the BBC acquired the rights to the Beatles’ second feature film Help! placing it in a prime family viewing slot of 15.30 on the afternoon of Boxing Day, immediately after It’s a Christmas Knockout. This was my first exposure to the Beatles on celluloid and I enjoyed it for the music as much as the Fabs’ wacky knockabout stuff. Boxing Day 1973 brought yet another screening of A Hard Day’s Night and this time we were tuned in. Help! was back for a second showing the following year and finally, on Boxing Day 1975, came Let it Be, earning its UK television premiere.
For the next few years, Christmas was Beatle-free on BBC television, but in 1979 came the best yet: a complete season comprising every movie the fab four had ever been involved in. This was to prove an historic season as it remains, to this day, the only occasion on which any UK broadcaster has scheduled all the available Beatle films in a single season. And on this occasion the BBC2 schedulers aimed for completeness.
The season kicked off on Friday 21 December with a genuine rarity. Magical Mystery Tour had remained unbroadcast since its one and only repeat on BBC2 back in 1968 – the only occasion to date of its having been shown in colour. Ironically, Tim Beddows and myself had seen it a matter of months earlier on an 8mm print hired from a film library. I was expecting an upgrade in quality from the TV broadcast, but in all honesty it was hard to tell it apart from the grainy 8mm dupe.
I’ll digress here for a moment with a reminder that film material deemed to be ‘of broadcast quality’ back in the 1970s simply wouldn’t make the grade today. No film was broadcast ‘clean’– dirt and ‘sparkle’ (dirt on the source negative) marred the image, colour grading was often very poor, and grain was inevitable. In the case of the Beatles’ movies, A Hard Day’s Night, Help! And Yellow Submarine, all shot on 35mm, looked fine on the small screen, but others in the season were showing their age. Not that we cared: the important thing was getting to see them at all.
Magical Mystery Tour had, of course, been a Christmas item when first unveiled back in 1967 – to the consternation of critics and the viewing public who simply couldn’t fathom what the Beatles were up to. Surely Sgt Pepper had dropped a few hints? Paul McCartney responded to criticism at the time by explaining that the film had suffered from being shown in black and white, but this was a specious excuse as the UK had colour television on only one channel, and colour sets were an expensive luxury far beyond the means of the average Beatle fan.
Returning to 1979, MMT’s third BBC broadcast was followed on Saturday 22 December by Help! but the real rarity came the following day. The Beatles at Shea Stadium hadn’t seen the light of day since 1966 and hasn’t been broadcast since. Much of the footage, restored and properly graded, found its way into the Anthology project of the 1990s, but at time of writing, the film still hasn’t been fully restored in its original presentation. The BBC’s copy was quite faded, but made for fascinating viewing. I’d only ever seen The Rutles’ take-off of the Shea Stadium gig, and my knowledge of the original was confined to a few blurry stills. Now at last was a chance to see – and hear – what all the fuss was about. Much of the soundtrack (if not all of it) was reportedy ‘improved’ at EMI studios before the film was allowed out into the wild, so what we hear on the soundtrack is not necessarily what the audience would have heard on the day, where mass hysteria drowned out the band’s performance.
I’ve never been entirely convinced by Yellow Submarine – it has fake Beatle voices, a soundtrack comprising a few of the Fabs’ lesser musical moments (‘All Together Now’/ ‘It’s All Too Much’) and it’s a cartoon. It had been shown twice by the BBC, in 1974 and 1976 before this Christmas Eve broadcast. Fortunately, the movie’s best original track – ‘Hey Bulldog’ – was present; the BBC used a British release print for transmission, but the American copy had omitted the sequence.
Pride of place in this season of festive fabness came on Christmas Day afternoon at 3pm when A Hard Day’s Night was shown for the fourth time. As the first and undoubtedly the best Beatle flick, it easily merited this prime slot in the schedule, which also marked its first outing on BBC2. By comparison, Boxing Day’s broadcast of Let it Be was something of a comedown – as indeed it always has been. This grainy print (which, I believe, later passed into the hands of Tim Beddows) would be the film’s last ever sighting on British television until a fully restored version was rolled out on Disney+ a few months back.
Given its completeness and the inclusion of genuine rarities, The Beatles at Christmas (as the BBC2 season was dubbed) remains unsurpassed in the annals of Beatle broadcasting. It’s the kind of Christmas scheduling that one still wishes for when flicking hopefully through the pages of yet another Radio Times double issue – but I fear we’ll be disappointed.
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