{"id":315270,"date":"2025-11-26T18:32:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T18:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/315270\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T18:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T18:32:08","slug":"the-beatles-anthology-the-flammed-together-new-episode-feels-totally-pointless-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/315270\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beatles Anthology: the flammed together \u2018new episode\u2019 feels totally pointless | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no doubt that the arrival of The Beatles<\/a> Anthology in 1995 was a big deal. The TV series was broadcast at prime time on both sides of the Atlantic, and ABC in the US even changed its name to ABeatlesC in its honour. The three accompanying albums (the first time the Beatles had allowed outtakes from their recording sessions to be officially released) sold in their millions. Its success helped kickstart the latterday Beatles industry, a steady stream of officially sanctioned documentaries, reissues, remixes, compilations and expanded editions, predicated on two ideas: that the Beatles\u2019 archive contains fathomless bounty; and that the band\u2019s story is so rich there\u2019s no limit to the number of times it can fruitfully be retold in fresh light.<\/p>\n

For a while, those ideas seemed to hold true, but recently, it\u2019s been hard not to think the Beatles\u2019 Apple Corps might be trying to feed an insatiable appetite for content from an increasingly bare cupboard. You can marvel at the highlights of Peter Jackson\u2019s TV series Get Back and still wonder whether the director wasn\u2019t stretching his material a little thin; whether nearly eight hours of it \u2013 plus a separate Imax film of the Beatles\u2019 final live performance on the roof of Apple\u2019s London HQ, and a reissue of the original 1970 Let It Be<\/a> documentary \u2013 might have been rather too much of a good thing.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles \u201964<\/a>, meanwhile, just re-edited familiar footage \u2013 much of it from the Maysles Brothers\u2019 1964 documentary, What\u2019s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, reissued in 1991 as The First US Visit, then again by Apple in 2004 \u2013 and spliced it with new interviews that suggested everything that needed to be said about the events of 1964 had already been said, and the two surviving Beatles had run out of new angles on a subject they had been answering questions about for 60 years.<\/p>\n

A similar sense of pointlessness attends the new version of Anthology. It arrives with a fourth album of outtakes, but 23 of its 36 tracks have been previously released, which means vinyl buyers are being asked to cough up nearly 70 quid for 50 minutes of \u201cnew\u201d music, most of which is pretty inconsequential to all but the most banzai Fabs devotee. There\u2019s no sign of Carnival of Light<\/a>, the near-mythic Stockhausen-influenced experiment the band recorded during the Sgt Pepper sessions, nor the fabled 27-minute version of Helter Skelter. Instead, you have to make do with a wobbly first take of their cover of Carl Perkins\u2019 Matchbox.<\/p>\n

Rock aristocracy \u2026 George Martin, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in The Beatles Anthology. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also an \u201call-new\u201d episode of the TV series, concentrating on the making of the original Anthology documentary and Free as a Bird and Real Love, the two John Lennon<\/a> demos the surviving members worked up into songs in the mid-90s. These events are now as far in the past as Beatlemania was when the Anthology series was produced: bizarrely, the footage from 30 years ago \u2013 a riot of ponytails, mullets, leather waistcoats and stonewashed denim \u2013 looks more dated than that from the 60s, the clothes sported by 90s rock aristocrats having yet to pass into the realm of classic style.<\/p>\n

The problem is, the new episode isn\u2019t all-new at all. It\u2019s essentially the bonus material from the 2003 DVD edition of Anthology padded out to 50 minutes: the three surviving Beatles being interviewed together at George Harrison\u2019s home and at Abbey Road, loosely jamming old rock\u2019n\u2019roll songs \u2013 and an early McCartney effort, Thinking of Linking \u2013 on acoustic guitars and ukuleles; working on the new tracks at Paul McCartney\u2019s home studio with producer Jeff Lynne; and sitting at a mixing desk while George Martin plays them multitrack recordings from the 60s.<\/p>\n

Some of the footage is sweet \u2013 there\u2019s a lovely moment where Ringo addresses his bandmates with a plaintive \u201cI like hanging out with you guys\u201d \u2013 and some of it is oddly telling: you could divine a lot from George Harrison\u2019s visible exasperation as the sessions for Free as a Bird and Real Love drag on. (Off camera, he famously refused to work on a third Lennon demo, Now and Then, deeming it \u201cfucking rubbish\u201d. McCartney and Starr eventually finished the track in 2023, 22 years after Harrison\u2019s death.)<\/p>\n

McCartney has a funny story about getting Abbey Road\u2019s recalcitrant engineers to keep working on Beatles sessions past their allotted hours by covertly dosing the studio\u2019s tea urn with amphetamines. It\u2019s nice to see them together and more or less happy, although you can\u2019t miss a certain tension between Harrison and McCartney. When Martin plays the multitrack of the latter\u2019s You Never Give Me Your Money, Harrison suggests it sounds \u201ca bit cheesy\u201d. McCartney is noticeably unamused.<\/p>\n

None of it is essential or particularly insightful. Like the Anthology 4 album, it\u2019s been flammed together to suggest added value, that there\u2019s something new to say about a subject that may well have been exhausted.<\/p>\n

The Beatles Anthology is on Disney+ now. The album Anthology 4 is out now on Apple Records<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s no doubt that the arrival of The Beatles Anthology in 1995 was a big deal. The TV…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-315270","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}