Magical Mystery Tour Revisited Arena

This programme

contains some strong language.

DIRECTOR: End number, that was

a wild track, applause, clapping,

and all the rest of it, cut.

ANNOUNCER: Now everyone try and look

very sad. Awwww!

Now, everybody, run out

past the cameras. Go!

I haven't seen colour,

I live in a monochromatic world.

I can't use colour.

I can do everything.

What do you mean by everything?

Everything, everything... Oh, it was

shape before, but now it's colour.

If you look to your left, ladies

and gentlemen, the view is not very

inspiring.

Ah, but if you look to

your right...

We didn't really want to do

something that didn't represent

where we were up to.

However, people didn't know where

we were up to,

and it wasn't the kind of thing we

could say, do a disclaimer before it

and say,

"Ladies and gentlemen, what

you are about to see is the product

"of our imaginations,

and believe me,

at this point they're quite vivid".

You couldn't do that you know,

you just had to be, "Here it is".

Who is that man?

Anyway, I tell you something, you

ain't coming away with me any more.

Who bought the tickets? I did.

Yeah, with my money.

I bought them, right, I'm taking you

out, you're not taking me anywhere.

Oh, ain't he lovely? Look at him,

look, just look at him.

Who's that?

Ringo, one of The Beatles,

he's marvellous.

Oh, those fellas.

He's smashing, plays the drums,

goes out and earns five bob,

not like you.

Listen, I've heard a few

stories about those boys.

I don't care what you've heard,

they're smashers and you shut up.

If you learnt to play the drums

you could earn an extra five bob.

I'm not doing so bad, am I?

Doing so bad?

You're as skint as arm holes every

week, what's the matter with you?

What's the matter with you? You've

moaned ever since we got on this bus.

Well, I promised your father

I'd take you, I'm sorry now,

I'm dead sorry.

I'm sorry I came, believe me.

'Just ad lib, I mean,

there's no script.

'We thought we could have

something running through it

'and it was me and her

and we're always arguing,

'and it sort of got us

from one place to the next.'

This picture probably reflects

their state of mind more than

anything else

they had done at the time.

That's the way they perceived

the world around them

For me, the freedom of the picture

was something that was very

very important,

the sense of breaking all the form.

Obviously some of it I didn't quite

understand in terms of the humour,

but it's the way it was

in those days,

I mean, people were trying

everything

and whether it fully succeeded or

not was really beside the point.

RADIO: 'In Scotland and Northern

Ireland there'll be slight frost,

'leading to icy patches on roads

around dawn.

'Afternoon temperatures

will range from 5 degrees centigrade,

41 Fahrenheit, in northern Scotland,

'to about eight degrees centigrade,

46 Fahrenheit, in southern England.'

ANNOUNCER: 'The Val Doonican Show...

'Top of the Pops...

'These are just some of the BBC One

programmes this Christmas.'

# I'm in with the in-crowd

# I go where the in-crowd goes

# I'm in with the in-crowd

# And I know

what the in-crowd knows... #

'In my family, Boxing Day was more

often the party day really,

lots of relatives around.'

'Aunties and uncles,

'and my sisters and brothers would

have all been over, having had their

'Christmas at home together,

and then over to us on Boxing Day.'

'It was tradition for us to go into

the neighbour's house on Boxing Day

'and we used to play Monopoly

in the afternoon, and I was always

'allowed a snowball with Advocaat

and lemonade in, that was my treat.'

The Christmas schedule is always

a difficult thing to get together,

and on that particular year in 1967

I had a gap on Boxing Day.

And suddenly I got to hear of this

film the Magical Mystery Tour.

It was described to me

as a film made by The Beatles,

containing The Beatles,

and containing a lot of music,

and that as far as I was

concerned was good enough.

Sitting in front of the television,

very, very close to the screen,

no clue who was in the room with me

apart from my dad, because

he seriously didn't like The Beatles

and spent most of his time grunting

and saying it was a load of rubbish,

"Why don't you turn it over?"

and, "Why don't you talk to the

visitors because we've got guests?"

My dad said, "They should get

their hair cut," and I said,

"Dad, you "know Jesus had long hair,

don't you?" and he just didn't know

what to say.

My parents didn't like it,

my dad thought it was rubbish,

and I'm pretty sure

he turned it off before the end.

I loved it, it was a great movie,

to see The Beatles doing

something different, as wizards

and all that sort of thing.

I was 15 years old,

I remember we sat

and we watched it right the way

through in silence, and afterwards

we looked at each other and

we said, "What was all that about?"

That was the beginning of the end

of their innocence to me

and my innocence.

DAVID FROST:

'I liked it,

with reservations and so on,

'but why were people

so puzzled by it, do you think?'

I think they thought it was bitty,

which it was a bit, you know, but

it was supposed to be like that,

I think a lot of people were looking

for a plot, and there wasn't one.

I think the younger people would get

it, the people who knew what

was going on in society, would get

it, and the older people who

were expecting Morecombe and Wise

or a British Variety Show,

wouldn't get it and I think in a way

quite rightly would be annoyed,

it was like they'd been cheated

out of their Christmas special.

There was, it seemed,

very little magic about this

particular mystery tour,

most reporting viewers in fact

finding it virtually

incomprehensible.

There was no theme or storyline,

they complained, the programme

appearing to consist of confused,

disconnected shots of the weirdest

things, and suggesting a nightmare

rather than a mystery tour.

The following are just a few

of the many outraged comments...

"The biggest waste of money

since the Ground Nut Scheme."

"Positively the worst programme

I can remember seeing

on any TV channel."

The small minority who did enjoy

the programme hailed it

as something completely different.

A schoolboy had this to say...

"It was one of the best Christmas

programmes we've had for a long

time.

"The idea was

clever as well as original,

"it was very funny in parts,

a marvellous programme

in black and white,

"in colour it would be

indescribable."

When they first toured they were

touring with comedians and singers

and stuff and it was

part of a showbiz package deal,

you know, so that was what,

'63 they were doing that?

So in the space of four years,

which is nothing, we're in the world

of Sergeant Pepper and kaftans

and incense and San Francisco

and all that kind of thing, so

I should imagine some members of the

establishment were rather sort of,

perturbed, because it looked like

The Beatles had gone

from being Take That

to "Take This" or something,

you know?

The entire nation had been

let down by The Beatles.

They hated it, at least the people

who wrote in the newspaper

hated it, you know. Don't forget

that with all the success

we'd had, every time something

came out, a new record or whatever,

they'd all try and slam it

so that, you know,

because once they'd built you up

that high, all they can do is

knock you back down again, I mean

that's what happens, that's life,

so they really didn't like it,

but it's understandable too because

it wasn't a brilliant scripted thing

that was executed well,

it was like a little home movie

really, an elaborate home movie.

I don't know, I should never have

brought you, you're really getting

on my nerves.

There's no pleasure for me either,

there really isn't,

I've had the worst

time of my life here.

Worst time of your life?!

Worst time of my life,

it's the draggy-ist tour I've

been on with you.

Good God, I don't know.

And it won't happen again,

it's the last time I take you out,

you come round to our house moaning

and groaning, nothing to do, I take

pity on you, "Come on, I'll take you

on this tour."

You take pity on me and I have to

pay for you, oh, yes, very good!

Well, that's fair,

I'm taking you out, aren't I?

Oh, you're a beautiful nephew,

yes, you are.

Anyway, just behave, there's

a lot of nice people on this coach

and they're all looking at us.

I'll smack you, don't

talk to your auntie like that.

Don't you smack me down missus,

I'll smack you down!

Don't talk to Auntie like that!

Don't smack me.

Now shut up!

Please!

It was Paul's idea really.

We were hanging out in the studio,

you know, looking for stuff to do,

really, and he came up with

this idea, he said, "Look,

"I've got this idea."

And we said, "Great!"

And it actually moved from that

circle...to this...to this...

Then you can cut in the movie.

'When a man buys a ticket

for a Magical Mystery Tour,

'he knows what to expect.

'We guarantee him

the trip of a lifetime

'and that's just what he gets...the

incredible Magical Mystery Tour!'

It was basically a charabanc trip

which people used to go on

from Liverpool to see the Blackpool

Lights, and they'd get, you know,

loads of crates of beer and an

accordion player and all get pissed.

All the coach trips

I went on to Blackpool,

the lights were very fuzzy...

but that's another story!

'On your marks.

'Get set.

'Go!'

This time I mean it.

I can't breathe any more

The part of Magical Mystery Tour

Americans would also not get, were

the things that were very English.

For example, the concept of a

Mystery Tour, America didn't have,

you had to know where you were

going before you got on to a bus.

It's a very English concept

that you have old dears that

you like to be around no

matter how hip you are

and that you have extended family

that you're not embarrassed by,

and the people on that coach were

old dears and extended family.

So it just seemed like a very odd

thing for The Beatles to want to do.

The Beatles were cultural

mission control,

they were where it was at,

culture was them,

they were culture...why are they

hanging around with fat old women?

Nothing against fat old women,

but I'm talking

about the prejudices of the time

of the people who would be watching.

I don't think Americans would

have gotten it.

It was made like an art film.

The small narrative of the bus just

sort of held it together again,

but again, it wasn't... You weren't

supposed to know where it was going.

'67, August, I arrived, I thought

it was kind of a dream come true,

because it was

like a gigantic...the part

I was focused on was a gigantic

costume ball, it seemed to me.

People were just dressed

outrageously, beautifully.

I want to do some breeches,

some gold breeches down to the knee

but with buttons

from about there upwards.

What is this thing you've got here?

This button? That's a button...

it's green, and it says "go".

I can see it's green.

Yeah, but it means "go",

instead of you know all the other

buttons that people wear that've

got messages on them?

Oh, yes.

This one just says

"go ahead" because it's green.

What I loved was the contrast

between the new generation,

the music world, and the bowler-

hatted, pinstriped city gents.

Everything seemed to be

nicely defined,

which of course for an American,

was fresh, because America,

everything's supposed to be

equal. People camouflage

the differences.

In England, it was clear

what the differences were.

Thing is, in the '60s,

Britain was still very straight,

there was the

one British way of life.

Businessmen still wore bowler hats

and carried furled umbrellas,

and if you deviated only quite

slightly from how you were

supposed to behave then you were

very much frowned upon.

This is still the period

when they used to lock up

children's swings on Sundays, we're

talking about a very repressive,

admittedly very benign,

but still a very repressive society.

# Cool Britannia

# Britannia, you are cool

# Take a trip

# Britons ever ever ever shall be hip

# Hit me, hit me... #

I had a guy, and he came to paint

on my wall of the extension,

his idea of The Creation.

And anyway, it went on

and suddenly he's in the windows,

he's all over the place, but

anyway I come down...he's a hippie,

a little hippie guy, and I see

this guy and he's in the kitchen

and he's got a suit and tie on,

I said, "What happened?"

He said, "Oh, I'm going home.

Flower Power hasn't reached Leeds."

The London sort of underground

culture was really just a few

hundred people probably,

at the centre,

and then maybe a few thousand

all together.

There were an awful

lot of people who just used the sort

of '60s ideas, just to have fun,

I mean it was a hedonistic movement,

very much, I mean, it wasn't

a political movement in any

of the normal senses of the word.

Most of it was to do with

hanging out on the King's Road

and wearing frilly clothes

and taking a lot of drugs

and having a lot of sex basically.

In London, it's still embryonic, the

scene hasn't got very far at all.

In Amsterdam, it's reached

very large proportions,

it's becoming a very big force there,

people are getting worried by it,

the older generation.

But of course the answer they have is

perfect.

The young people are quite prepared

to wait for the older generation to

die out.

This is Alexandra Palace,

the people's palace or Ally Pally

as it's known to everyone.

And in the summer of 1967 we had

a big benefit here for

International Times, which we called

The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream.

It was because International Times

had been busted for obscenity and

we really thought that we had a big

court case on our hands and needed

to raise money, and 42 different

bands and performance acts

offered their services,

all for free.

Of course a huge number of people

used it

as an excuse to take acid, which

was nice in a way because it's

a beautiful location,

you know, the grounds here

are absolutely gorgeous.

# Revolution

# Revolution

# Revolution

I really wish the people who look

with anger at the weirdos,

at the happenings,

at the psychedelic freak outs,

would instead of looking with anger,

just look with nothing

and with no feeling you know,

be unbiased about it,

because they really don't realise

that what these people are talking

about is something that they really

want themselves, it's something

that everyone wants, you know,

it's personal freedom to be able

to talk and to be able to say things

and it's dead straight, it's a real

sort of basic pleasure for everyone,

but it looks weird from the outside.

So this is the original premises

of Indica Books and Gallery,

which was started

by Peter Asher, John Dunbar

and myself back in 1965 and it had

a lot of very close Beatles

connections,

Paul McCartney for instance,

helped put up the shelves

and paint the walls, he was very

good at filling in holes in

concrete.

There's always this gang

of people from International Times,

Indica and the whole scene,

you know, it's trying to do,

trying to see where we are now, you

know it's just a straightforward...

endeavour kind of thing, just to do

something, other than what's been

done before because what's been done

before isn't necessarily the answer.

John Lennon of course,

famously met Yoko Ono here

when we gave her her very first

show in Europe.

In addition to that,

we used to have a big settee

when it was a book shop,

on the ground floor

and that's where

John Lennon first encountered

the work of Timothy Leary

and in Leary's re-writing

of The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

is where he found the line, "Turn

off your mind and drift downstream."

# Turn off your mind, relax and float

downstream

# It is not dying

# It is not dying... #

People like Andy Warhol are trying

to integrate themselves with

a commercial world,

to become a part of it,

but also do what they want to do,

this is what a breakthrough is.

So here we are in Duke Street

and at number 69 is where

Robert Fraser had his celebrated

gallery in the late '60s.

He introduced them

to a lot of artists

and people surrounding the sort of

Hollywood and New York art scene,

people like Andy Warhol,

Claes Oldenburg.

This is the story of your lives!

The old dreams, the left placenta...

I had a period of a few years,

when I was living in London

and I wasn't married

like the other guys,

they were living outside of London,

so I would kind of probably see more

cinema, see more theatre, go to more

events, just because I was there.

And one of the things that

I got was a Super 8 camera,

started off just doing snapshots,

doing your home movies

to go on holiday, but then I got

more and more interested in it, and

I found one that you could rewind

so you could then go through again.

I did a film that I wish

I had now which was out of my hotel

window in Paris, I filmed

a gendarme on traffic duty

and he's just stopping all the cars,

so that was one roll through,

and then the second time,

he'd gone so I then just filmed all

the traffic, so it looked like this

impossible job where the

traffic was just going through him

all the time, which was nice

enough for ten minutes,

it was amusing enough for me.

But then the nice thing was

I found a soundtrack with a jazz

saxophonist called

Albert Ayler who did a wonky version

of the Marseillaise,

so while this guy is,

"Oh, no, no, no, monsieur,

oh la la," you hear this...

I was doing a lot of that, which I

think is part of why I wanted to do

Magical Mystery Tour.

SAXOPHONE PLAYS THE MARSEILLAISE

McCartney always

had his antennae out,

so those would be the avant garde

kind of things he would do, but he

would also go to the various kind of

night clubs and hear torch singers

and he used those words, that

he always had his antennae out,

stuff would go in and it might not

come out for years and years.

I went with him for instance

to a concert by AMM,

which was a sound band,

which there was no noticeable rhythm

or melody or anything like that.

And McCartney after a

while started to join in,

he banged on the radiators

and stuff like that.

It was only a small group,

about ten people in the audience,

it was one of those sitting on the

floor in the Royal College of Art

sort of gigs.

They've got all these rules

for everything,

rules of how to live, how to paint,

how to make music, and it's

just not true any more, you know,

they don't work, all those rules.

I think what happened with

The Beatles is,

we always thought, "Ooh, the people

back home would love to know this,"

so we felt like we were

the megaphone,

so if it was happening to us

and we liked it, we thought,

"We should let them know," because

they're not down here hanging

out with the artists but it would be

good to pass on the good news.

It was a 50/50 thing,

they were influenced by what was

going on in the underground but they

themselves, by taking some of those

ideas on board, spread the ideas

so rapidly and so quickly through

their fame, that they became sort

of leaders of it, in a curious way.

I was going there and I asked Derek,

"Is there anything I can bring?"

With the emphasis on "anything",

obviously pot,

I was thinking maybe, and he said,

"No, no, no, we have everything,"

so I arrived and there's Cros and

McGuinn and I was introduced to the

lads, and then they announced that

we were all going to take LSD, and

I thought, "Hmmm, far out, I wonder

how I'm going to drive this car

home?"

I assumed that it was the first

time that they all had taken acid,

it wasn't my first time,

I doubt it was Crosby and McGuinn's

first time either...

No, I know it wasn't their first

time, but for the boys, I don't

know.

# She said

# I know what it's like to be dead

# I know what it is to be sad

# And she's making me feel like

I've never been born... #

# Well, in a villa

in a little old Italian town... #

Some beautiful underground stuff was

happening, but it was underground

and we needed to get above ground.

# Many yearn to love her

but their hopes all tumble down... #

I was already a tremendous fan

of Bruce Conner,

he had a style of editing that was

very influential on me

as a shooter and as an editor

and as a performer,

because I spent a lot of time

with him looking at his films.

# Just a cold and lonely

# Lovely work of art...#

We had our own art, we had our own

poetry, our own music and songs,

lyrics,

we had our own books, we had our

own costumes, we had our own music,

everything, we had all these...

Whoa, we don't have our own film.

Paul and Brian were

sitting on a big settee,

very long red settee similar to this

and they had a number of papers

in front of them, particularly

Epstein had a pie chart

and they were already planning

who would do what in a film.

Epstein was delighted of course

because they'd just finished

a major album, they were no longer

touring,

they hadn't really got a great deal

to do,

and he was quite clearly very, very

enthusiastic about the whole thing.

He was just a beautiful fella

you know, and it's terrible.

What are your plans now?

Well, we haven't made any,

I mean, we've only just heard,

haven't we?

Epstein had a little office

in an ultra modern building with

a parking space underneath it,

and they were all in there,

I didn't know what the hell it was

all about, and they said to me,

"We've said to Epstein we want to

make this film," and I think

they thought that now that he was

dead they would go ahead,

they wanted to go ahead and make it

anyway, and this was an important

sort of genuflection to the work

that they had done with Brian,

and they did try at that point

to express, they wanted to

be free and easy and

not be constricted

by the studio system

and the things that were in it.

They had the opportunity

and the money to do something that

nobody else would have been

able to do, and therefore it is

a unique piece of filmmaking.

You could almost call it a vanity,

like a vanity publication

of what they were doing,

but it was more than that.

# Walking down a very narrow alley

in the street

# I saw an old man

standing by a wall

# Hastily, I ran up to the old man

# And I said to him in

phrases very small

# Get away from the wall

# Get away from the wall

# Get away from the wall... #

Ivor Cutler we knew, of course,

because he had those great records.

I'm sure somebody saw,

Nat Jackley, was his name?

You know, on a show or something.

The other thing we used to do,

at night,

we'd go through

the Artists Need Work books

and we'd go, "Oh, yeah, he looks

good," or "Oh, yeah look at that

person!"

and we'd just pick 'em out the book.

# Oh, baby, you made me love you

# I didn't wanna do it

I didn't wanna do it...#

Good morning, lads and lasses,

my name is Miss Winters.

I just wanted to say,

if there's anything I can do

to be of assistance,

you know what to do.

I think what happened with The

Beatles was, if you were around,

you were on the bus, you know,

if you'd been wherever

the bus set off from that day

and they thought you were all right,

you'd have been on the bus.

Would you like to come on

a coach trip with The Beatles?

They're making a film.

They're making a film, that's it,

that's all we knew.

I think we had two days' notice

Yeah, we got it on the Friday

and had to go on the Monday

I left my job on the Friday, and

I didn't go back on the Monday.

And I did lose it,

but it was worth it.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know the rest of the words.

You can 'la-la' it darling.

Yeah, just sing, if you don't know

the words...

Are we on?

Yeah we're running

# Oh, yesterday... #

Do you like your old Auntie,

darling?

Oh, you're all right,

you're one of the best.

# All my troubles seemed

so far away... #

That bus was hysterical!

All the people on the bus, too,

whoa, you know, what a great

thought.

There was something very musical,

very dance-like about the

editing of the Magical Mystery Tour

number on the bus.

The freedom of the camera along with

the restraint of the characters

looking towards the lens.

For me this has always stayed,

it's one of my favourite

moments in movies.

And that stayed with me over the

years and I think actually looking

back at it,

has influenced a lot of the work

I've done.

Listen, this film.

Oh, yeah

Tell me something about

the storyline?

Well, you see, it's about a group

of common or garden strange

people on a coach tour,

around anywhere, really,

and things happen to them, you see,

something will go diddly dee,

di diddly dee, Magical Mystery Tour,

and there's a little scene...

You've got them!

I've got what?

You've got them on your head

Oh, where are they, do you want to

knock 'em off?

Yeah.

Go on then.

It was lovely to see John being

so comfortable in playing with

this little girl, but it's a side

of John that you never really saw.

Put it on your hat!

And I must say I don't think I'd

really seen it much to that point.

I'd love to say there was this

incredible master plan,

but, er, there wasn't.

We thought it might be a good idea

to go towards Cornwall,

where I think we'd had fond

childhood memories.

I'd hitchhiked down there when I was

a kid, George and I had done that.

I don't think we ever really were

told the reasoning

behind much of it, it was just,

"This is going to happen and

"so and so is going to be doing

this and so and so is going to be

doing that."

And we just did it, to be honest,

it was...spontaneous

I think is the word.

Yes.

Spontaneous.

That's a very

good word, yeah.

You didn't have time to think about

it because it was all sort of

happening,

but then if you analysed what was

happening, you really didn't know

anyway, did you?

You couldn't really put

your finger on what was happening.

Paul always had a tremendous

interest in spontaneity and random

events and effects, a very '60s thing

of course, but random in his

sense would be an accidental trick

of the light or a superimposition.

# Oh, whoa, whoa...

# Round and round and round

# And round and round

# He never listens to them

# He knows

that they're the fools... #

How do you frankly feel about all

the reporters and all the rest of us

following you around?

It's OK.

You don't mind us?

Well...

We don't get on your nerves?

No,

you're not all that bad.

What's the film going to

be all about?

It's a mystery...to me.

Keep back, please. Excuse us.

Well, what one could see very

clearly were the sequences,

but how the sequences related to

each other, how they juxtaposed

themselves in terms of an overall

story, I could never see.

There was almost like,

improvisation where everyone

gets into the groove and then

they start expanding on that, and to

be honest with you, I don't remember

if they mimed to play back, I guess

they did, actually they must have.

Because all of a sudden,

I remember the first time the

sound guy testing and you

hear one of the tracks booming out

over the Kent countryside, it was

amazing.

And everybody was like galvanised,

the energy that the music gave them.

# I am the eggman

# They are the eggmen

# I am the walrus,

goo goo goo joob... #

Already there was abstract qualities

in their humour and their writing

and their approach to all

sorts of stuff and I think the film

was a sort of natural progression,

all came out of that culture.

I thought it was brilliant, I did,

I just thought it was like anarchic.

# Crying

# I'm crying... #

When we were doing, what was it,

it was the Walrus scene or

something like that, Paul got me

up about two in the morning,

he said, "We want a dozen midget

wrestlers for tomorrow."

Dozen midgets, you know.

I said, "How the hell do

"I get a dozen midgets down here

in time to shoot tomorrow morning?"

He said, "I don't know."

I mean, it was worse than

the Hollywood system, you know,

because Hollywood had real power.

But that's what I did,

and they were produced.

The sequences were just suggested,

often by memories from

our childhood, things that we'd

remembered or we'd remembered

seeing or doing ourselves.

Action!

So, for instance, a tug of war

was something you'd see

at all the village fetes,

there'd often be a tug of war

between

the burly men of the neighbourhood.

So, a lot of these things

found their way in as ideas.

I suppose the whole film has a bit

of a village fete atmosphere to it.

It's all their childhood memories,

all being jumbled up

and juxtaposed, coming out as a

series of fairly surreal images.

Don't get upset, don't

expect something other than

The Beatles, if you expect

The Beatles, you're getting them,

full force, they are really there,

much more than

they were in Help and much more than

they were in Hard Day's Night.

They were really there because it

was all their thing, they were

shooting, they were deciding what to

say, what to wear, how to do this.

In that way it was

a Magical Mystery Tour of them.

# Sitting on a cornflake

# Waiting for the van to come

# Corporation tee-shirt

Stupid bloody Tuesday

# Man, you've been a naughty boy

You let your face grow long

# I'm the eggman, they are the eggmen

# I am the walrus,

goo goo goo joob... #

It seems to me now that Magical

Mystery Tour is an attempt

to fuse those elements

of quintessential Englishness,

which made The Beatles

feel like the people they were,

with the

advanced psychedelic elements

that they had introduced into

the culture. It's a graft.

# There's a fog upon LA

# And my friends have lost

their way... #

Well, shooting Blue Jay Way was

great, George had written

that song because he'd

stayed on Blue Jay Way in America.

And I was just always

interested in cameras and lenses,

and I had all those prism lenses

and close-up macro lenses

and things,

and so it sort of went with it,

"Oh, I'll bring my cameras, and

you'll sit over there, and it'll be

"you know, smoky or whatever, and

I'll just shoot it through these."

And in those days, thanks to...

some medication,

it was the most exciting

thing we'd ever seen!

# Ask a policeman on the street

# There's so many there to meet... #

I think you can really feel

the influence of the

avant-garde cinema at the time, they

all took their own home movies, etc,

and always experimenting with this

imagery and so it seemed natural

that they would try to create

something that was certainly not

the traditional narrative they had

worked with in the Richard Lester

films which were quite wonderful,

but in a very, very different way.

Almost like making their own movie

paintings, music pieces,

dance pieces, and it wasn't cinema,

it was something else.

# Please don't you be very long

# Please don't be long... #

There was always good songs,

there was a couple of good songs,

and there was a few funny scenes.

I mean, the scene to me that

stands out, is the one of John

shovelling the spaghetti

onto the fat woman's plate.

I mean, that was the best

bit of the movie for me.

Paul showed me what his idea was

and this is how it went,

it went round like this,

the story and production.

He says, "Here's the segment, you

write a little piece for that."

And I thought, "Fucking hell, I've

never made a film, what does he

mean?" He said, "Write a script,"

so I ran off and wrote the dream

sequence for the fat woman

and all the thing with the spaghetti

and all that.

Action!

John and Paul basically would

put their heads together

and come back and they'd say,

"Right, this is what we want to do

tomorrow."

Something as simple as you know,

half a tonne of spaghetti,

and you have to get George Cook

out of bed and say,

"George, first thing you do is send

your buyer down to get as much

spaghetti as there is."

I do remember watching

John on rehearsal or whatever,

and the pleasure he got,

like a kid playing with mud.

Slopping out all this

spaghetti on that woman.

I mean, there are bits of it that

are silly, and a bit self-indulgent

but on the other hand

it's not pretentious, I don't think

they ever were.

They always managed to keep

the right side of that line

and where you had Paul wanting

to reflect his background,

John would come along, literally

Spaniard In The Works and give it

that edge and made it sinister,

and bits of Magical Mystery Tour

are actually quite frightening,

and quite scary, and that's John.

I can hardly get my breath.

It's intake, Jessie, not output.

I am, I am! I am already,

three times this week already.

For goodness sake, Jessie, sit down.

When you talk about Bunuel, everyone

was so shocked to see that shot of

him apparently cutting an eye.

and I remember how shocking it was

to see that.

Now you look back on it and go,

that was a very important thing in

the history of cinema. You

probably couldn't have had

Psycho without that.

And that's the nice thing that

happens with these things.

I mean I don't want to elevate

Magical Mystery Tour

to the great heights of, you know,

the most important

things in cinema history,

but I think in a lesser way,

it did set a tone that then people

could pick up,

and sort of say, "Well, if they've

done that, we could do this."

It's not worrying too much about your

public image at that point I think.

It's about what you want to do.

Here's an opportunity to make a film,

what do you want to put in this

film, what scene do you want to do?

So, I admire it from that

point of view.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

when the coach stops,

would the gentlemen

please follow Mr Johnson,

and the ladies, stay with me?

It is immensely entertaining

because you don't know where

it's going to go next, suddenly

you're in a strip club.

Off we go, a jolly evening with

jolly Jimmy.

Come on, where are they?

I do remember Viv being rather

sort of miffed at the thought,

because Paul suggested he wore a

kind of chiffony scarf

to look more trendy.

And I don't think Viv took kindly

to that, but he did it.

# The cab was racing

through the night, mmm-mm-mm

# Baby, don't do it

# His eyes in the mirror, keeping

Cutie in sight, uh-huh-huh

# Baby, don't do it... #

I think we related to them because

they were mischievous and funny,

but we didn't care

about show business particularly.

# Baby, curves can kill

# Death-cab for Cutie...#

We had a lot of that kind of

art school world in common,

you know, we'd all

seen the art movies,

we'd all seen the certain paintings.

We knew Magritte and things

like that, and you know, when you're

twentysomethings, you like them

so you want to kind of embrace them

in a way and use them in things.

And so if, you know, we had,

robots or masks or things like

that, we offered them up as images.

# Someone's gonna make you pay your

fare

# Someone's gonna make you pay your

fare

# Someone's gonna make you

pay your fare! #

We have no idea what the film was

going to be like, but there was

a kind of clue in the title,

you know, Magical Mystery Tour,

it's a clever title because you can

pretty much do anything, you know.

# Death-cab for Cutie

# Death-cab for Cutie...#

I was sitting in front

of my dad on the floor,

he was sitting in the chair

and I was like,

resting against the arm of the chair

and the stripper came on and

as it started to get sort of, more

and more risque I suddenly found

this hankie being draped across my

eyes, which was quite embarrassing

for me because obviously I thought

I was so grown up at 11 years old.

Magical Mystery Tour, I think it was

telling the older generation

that things were changing,

that's how I felt,

that the old routines were

going to change.

I think probably my dad may have

found it a bit scary.

Sir, I am sorry that Mr Norman Hare

disliked Magical Mystery Tour.

We are an elderly couple and had

never seen or heard of The Beatles.

The film entranced us

and was all too short.

I thought it a clever blend of all

too real life and pure magic.

They achieved the atmosphere

of a coach tour perfectly,

the surge of humanity from the coach

at each stop, the sad wet sands

of the inevitable dead low

tide on West Country beaches.

These and other points were cleverly

heightened by the fantastic

dream or nightmare sequences,

also familiar to the coach tourer

who has nodded off.

The photography was imaginative

and original

and I laughed till I cried

several times.

But I fear they will not make

another film like it,

and perhaps they had better not try.

Yours faithfully, Ann Lee

Michelle (Mrs). Milverton, Somerset.

I think there is within them, a kind

of English idea of subversion,

rather than the American idea

of subversion, of stone throwing

and that sort of thing,

so it's much subtler,

because England as itself is

a very different place,

observing it for 50 years

as a foreigner, an outsider.

The way the English respond

and change is quite different

from the way other nations, they

don't actually go at it head on.

It's a sort of travelogue,

it's a sort of documentary,

it's a sort of slice of British

working class life.

It has so many goodies in it, but

I can understand why establishment

felt threatened by what The Beatles

were doing, because you know,

if everyone grows their hair long

who's going to be in the army?

Get your bloody hair cut!

For me, it certainly still holds up.

The imagery was created without

CGI at a time when it was

all photochemical, and some of it

we may have gotten used to now.

Now of course, the emphasis

on professionalism,

and polish and politeness is very,

very...has come back now

with a vengeance, it's expected

and there's a tendency to forget

that's really only one choice,

you know, one way of going.

I think it's brilliant, I think it's

just a laugh,

and I don't think that's just

because of our memories,

I think it's just a piece of film

that would be enjoyable.

I don't care what the people

think about it, I'm still proud to

be part of it.

Yes, yeah.

It's a charming acknowledgement,

and indeed perhaps a profession,

in a very positive way,

of these are the people we are,

and these are the people

we've become, mixed together.

# Let's all get up

and dance to a song

# That was a hit before

your mother was born

# Though she was a born

a long, long time ago... #

Ha. God, he's the worst dancer!

# Your mother should know

# Sing it again... #

Yeah, Your Mother Should Know,

the dancing boys.

How great.

# Before your mother was born...#

Who choreographed that?

I don't know if we did that or not,

it looked too real for us,

because it was all...you know, I'd

like to say I did but I don't know.

You can see that in some

of the segments we'd had no idea,

there's just a smiley face

in number four,

so that was like,

"We'll think of something fun."

And I think we thought that just to

have an improvised film would give

us a lot of freedom and would also

show the kind of playfulness and the

freedom that we were experiencing

as The Beatles at that time.

However, we realised we had to have

something to show people,

and when the cameraman would say,

"Where do you want me to be?"

you'd say, "On the coach,

in the morning, 9 o'clock,"

and then we thought, well,

that's enough information.

# Your mother should know

# Your mother should know

# Your mother should know... #

You know, you could argue that,

oh, The Beatles caught the bus,

but The Beatles didn't catch

the bus, they were the bus.

# Roll up

# Roll up for the mystery tour

# Roll up

And that's an invitation

# Roll up for the mystery tour

# Roll up

To make a reservation

# Roll up for the mystery tour

# The magical mystery tour

is coming to take you away

# Coming to take you away

# The magical mystery tour

is dying to take you away

# Dying to take you away

Take you today. #