Or... The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious
What did the Beatles watch on television? It’s a question that I doubt has been asked many times, if at all. Did they even have time to watch television? Between 1963 and 1966, the whirlwind of Beatlemania – an almost constant round of touring and recording – didn't leave them much time to themselves. It’s likely that they spent more time appearing on television than they did watching it. But they definitely did watch television, whenever time allowed. The question is, what programmes were they watching?
In all the Beatles’ recorded work there is only one reference to a specific television series, although they were occasionally influenced by things they’d seen on the small screen: Paul’s desire to use a piccolo trumpet on the recording of 'Penny Lane' is known to have arisen after watching a televised performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto. The concert was shown as part of BBC2’s Masterworks series on the evening of Wednesday 11 January 1967. So far, so good. But what other items on television were the Fab Four aware of?
The Beatles grew up in an age when home entertainment was dominated by the wireless, and it’s well known that they were great fans of the Goons – the same anarchic humour can be found in John Lennon’s humorous writings, and Paul in particular was wont to assume funny voices at the drop of a hat. Even if there were television sets in the Beatle family households, it’s doubtful that they would have devoted much time to watching the box, being more focused on their musical activities away from the home.
When the group were quizzed as to their likes and dislikes for a music press feature in 1963, only John and Paul made any mention of television, John listing it among his hobbies and Paul among his ‘likes’. An early acknowledgement of television – probably the first in the band’s career – can be found on volume 2 of the CD collection The Beatles at the BBC. And the programme in question was... The Flowerpot Men.
Bill and Ben are referenced twice on the CD, the first mention coming in an edition of Pop Goes the Beatles, recorded on 10 July 1963 for transmission twenty days later. George reads out a fan letter asking if he likes The Flowerpot Men: "I think you are even nicer than Ben, but I hate Bill cause he squeaks" runs the letter. For the final edition of the series, recorded on 3 September for broadcast on the 24th, the group signed off by singing their own version of the song that closed each week’s episode of The Flowerpot Men… ‘Goodbye Bill, Goodbye Ben…’ In the hands of the Beatles, the lyrics were now:
‘Goodbye George, Goodbye John, Ringo, Paul, Ringo, Paul, Rodney Burke’
(Burke was the programme’s presenter).
When the band were able to make time to watch television, one of their favourite programmes was, apparently, Steptoe and Son. When John made his famous ‘rattle your jewelery’ announcement at the end of the Beatles’ appearance at the Royal Command Performance on 4 November 1963, he ended it by pulling a face that could well have been meant as an imitation of Wilfrid Brambell in the role of Albert Steptoe – Brambell and Corbett appeared on the same bill that evening in a specially written comedy sketch. Brambell would, of course, go on to appear with the Beatles in their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, whose script was peppered with knowing references to Steptoe. In the TV series, Brambell’s character was famously derided as a ‘dirty old man’ whilst in A Hard Day’s Night, he’s ‘very clean.’ On 2 December of the same year, the Beatles made an appearance on the Morecambe and Wise Show, recorded at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. It’s clear that they’re all familiar with Eric and Ernie and their work – at one point, George utters Eric’s famous catchphrase ‘get out of that!’
There's no evidence that the Beatles ever watched Doctor Who. The band was approached (via Brian Epstein) to appear in an episode during 1965, but the idea was vetoed, perhaps without even being put in front of the band. Instead, a brief clip from Top of the Pops (10 April 1965) was included in the serial The Chase. John and Cynthia were photographed in close proximity to a Dalek prop at the Cannes Film Festival in May of the same year, but John seems to be ignoring it. Some fans have mistakenly assumed that the Beatles appeared in a Doctor Who parody based on the Abominable Snowmen serial, but they’d got their wires crossed: the photographs in question date from the band’s Christmas show of December 1964, almost three years before the Abominable Snowmen appeared on TV.
For our next bit of Beatle telly-viewing evidence, we must fast forward to Monday 8 November 1965. The band was in the middle of recording sessions for the Rubber Soul album (as yet untitled), and time was running short. A session was booked in Studio Two at EMI Studios, running from 9pm until 3am. Equally pressing was the need to record some comic material for inclusion on the obligatory fan club Christmas record. To this end, in the hope of capturing some off-the-cuff nonsense, George Martin left the tape running during rehearsals for George’s song ‘Think For Yourself’. Amongst lots of spontaneous banter and silly voices, Paul suddenly goes into a parody of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray. The band are trying to work out the song’s three-part harmony:
JOHN: (In cod American accent): We’ll have one more try, you know… I can see.
PAUL: (In cod American accent mispronouncing the word ‘try’): Troy… it looks like Supercar’s getting out of control, Troy.
JOHN (Laughs)
PAUL (singing in comedy falsetto): Marina, Aqua Marina…
JOHN: We’ll do one of them for Christmas.
PAUL: Yeah. (Continuing in falsetto, singing to the tune of ‘Aqua Marina’): How come you fuck up everything that you do?
(Laughter)
JOHN (in comedy evil alien voice): I will be pleased to see the Earthmen disintegrated!
The routine is cut off here by a return to the work in hand – so we never get to hear what else the Beatles might have made of a Gerry Anderson parody. They would have been a few months ahead of the curve if they had – Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s famous ‘Superthunderstingcar’ skit wouldn’t appear until the spring of 1966.
What this snatch of banter tells us is that the Beatles were aware of Gerry Anderson’s puppet adventure series, even if Paul has got Supercar and Stingray muddled up. The series had ended by the time of the recording session, but two days earlier a first-run episode of Thunderbirds had been broadcast on ATV London. Thunderbirds, of course, included amongst their number a yellow submarine – Thunderbird Four – although the Beatles, if they were watching at all, would have been watching in black and white...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z9RQqfvmJI
By 1967, the Beatles had stopped touring, and once he’d returned from filming How I Won the War in Spain, John reportedly spent a lot of time in his den at his Surrey mansion, watching television. Thus we find the one and only reference to a television series in any Beatle lyric, which occurs in ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, a song inspired by a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and later dismissed by Lennon as ‘a piece of garbage’. Conmenting on the song, he later said: ‘I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing, and it [the commercial] came over.’
The song’s chorus lifts the lyrics from the Conflakes ad, but its most direct television reference comes in the line ‘it’s time for tea and meet the wife’. Meet the Wife was a domestic sitcom by writers Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, later to become better known for On the Buses. The show starred Freddie Frinton and Thora Hird as an argumentative married couple, and its fifth series had been shown during the autumn of 1966, around the time that the Beatles would have been preparing material for their next LP.
The next actual evidence we have of the Beatles having watched a specific piece of television comes on 8 January 1969, during filming of the aborted Get Back project – eventually realised as the movie Let it Be, before being refashioned by director Peter Jackson for release in 2021. It’s in this version rather than the original that George Harrison can be heard in conversation with Ringo about the previous evening’s television. They’ve both seen an episode of the BBC2 science fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown, broadcast at 21.05 on Tuesday 7 January. The episode in question, Immortality Inc, was the first of the third series, and no longer exists. Adapted from a novel by the American writer Robert Sheckley, the story concerns a man (Derek Benfield) whose mind has been implanted into a new body at a date in the distant future. From George’s description of the programme, it appears that the protagonist (or his mind) has been snatched from a car accident and brought back to life in the 22nd century.
George seems to have dozed off during the programme, because he complains that one minute he was watching ‘that science fiction thing’ and the next found himself halfway through ‘that crap about medals and things'. The ‘crap’ was in fact an episode of a BBC2 series, Europa (broadcast at 21.55) which, according to the Radio Times, ‘look[ed] at aspects of pomp and circumstance through European eyes’. The programme would scarcely be worthy of comment but for the fact that a piece of music used in the production – Johann Strauss’s ‘Kaiser Waltz’ – gave George the idea for a song in waltz time which by the next morning had become a prototype version of ‘I Me Mine’. ‘There was some music that was just playing… like a 3/ 4 thing’, he explained in the studio, demonstrating the new song on an acoustic guitar. One further point to consider here is how and why George and Ringo came to be watching BBC2. The answer is, most likely, colour: the channel had been broadcasting in colour since the summer of 1967, and the third series of Out of the Unknown was the first to be produced in colour. In January 1969, both BBC1 and ITV were still broadcasting in monochrome, so a Beatle with a colour television set was surely going to take advantage of it...
Meantime, John, according to his diary for 1969, was ‘watching telly’ pretty well every evening – though the entries never referred to any specific programmes. John was most likely the real telly addict in the band. His collection of humorous nonsense, In His Own Write (1964) includes a comical survey of television, 'The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious', in which Panorama becomes 'Panorasthma' and Granada's People and Places becomes 'Peckle and Braces'. Richard Dimbleby and Bill Grundy are namechecked in typical Lennon fashion as 'Rinkled Dinglebone' and 'Big Grunty'. The piece is actually a parody of the Pilkington Committee Report on broadcasting, that had been published in 1962. In John's mangled English, 'Pilkington Report' becomes both 'Fingletoad Resort' and 'Piltdown Retord'.
Whilst the band were often quizzed about their tastes in everything from music and fashion to food and girls, few if any journalists seem to have enquired as to what they watched on television, probably deciding that such a question would be deemed too trivial. Google the Beatles and television and you’ll find myriad references to their many TV appearances around the world, but almost nothing about what they actually watched, which is rather a pity. What these glimpses tell us is that the Beatles were essentially casual viewers, happy to sit down and watch whatever happened to be on at any given time, but with no special favourites. They had better things to do than sit at home watching the box, and even if they had been fans of a particular series, they'd never have been able to keep up with it from week to week. Post-Beatles, George famously became such a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus that he put up the money to help finance the film Life of Brian, but even in their solo careers, the Beatles had little or nothing to say on the subject of television.
From The Flowerpot Men to Out of the Unknown is, nevertheless, quite a televisual journey, finding room on the way for a bit of Bach, and some situation comedy. Not to mention Stingray… or was it Supercar?
