There are no real surprises. This was a burglary committed by an occasional burglar. But so what? There’s a whimsical quality to Arthur Cary’s film that feels of a piece with The Beatles’ music. George was a decent dad, a handy footballer and a sometime robber. Just the sort of person The Beatles would have grown up with and about whom Paul McCartney might have once written a song. McCartney even goes so far as to admit that, before rock immortality came knocking, he wasn’t above a bit of amateur thievery himself. “It’s there, I can nick it, so I will. Luckily, The Beatles took over. But I can sympathise with people who don’t have that kind of luck.”
Triumph and tragedy are tightly bound up in The Beatles’ story – which is presumably why they provoke this obsession in film-makers such as Sam Mendes, currently making four separate biopics about the band. The Lost Bass is the precise opposite. It’s an agreeably ambling tale, well told and with the quality of an anecdote spun over a pint. In other words, the Paul McCartney of music documentaries – pleasant, unpretentious and enough to put anyone in a good mood.
McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass is on BBC iPlayer