This is the scarcely credible beginning of the Great Adventure, going back, back, back into a great war in a grey time that seems to belong to other beings in other worlds. Britain under Hitler's bombs, boys not yet Beatles struggling for a place in the sun. Wonderful archive of yesterday's enemy seaports now united by primitive, derivative rock'n'roll - Hamburg and Liverpool, full of young men scuffling for position and rank, nobody with advantage except for real gifts and those the Beatles had aplenty: wit, music, energy, looks, personality. The good Lord sent them a manager, Brian Epstein, and a producer, George Martin, and so we see how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr influenced by the power of American r'n'r and r&b used their cheek and confidence and talent to get their first Number One in Britain: Please, Please Me. Wallow in these Black and White beginnings - see how the forties became the fifties became the sixties and discover how becoming the Beatles became.
The earth is moving fast beneath their speeding boots. Millions of saloon bar prophets who couldn't tell them apart had to hand it to them': "They've got something! From Liverpool, I hear - of all places." From Liverpool uber alles! They leave their Cavern Club in this episode and within months they take the ascendancy in the British pop world, and start to live the life of Riley in London. They play the Palladium, the Royal Albert Hall, The Royal Variety Show, sing Moonlight Bay with Morecambe and Wise, give a spare hit to the Rolling Stones, play hundreds of concerts in Britain, nip over to Sweden, invent Beatlemania, record I Want To Hold Your Hand (their 4th British number one in a year) and as if in a dream - while they're conquering Paris - the record goes to Number One in America three weeks before the Ed Sullivan Show in New York. If there had been no Beatles, no-one would have had the imagination to invent such a story.
This was still a time of wonderment on both sides of the equation. The world couldn't believe this magnificent four-headed creation could continue to be so delightfully entertaining and impudent and the creature couldn't believe the world could be so nice. Wherever they went now, first America, then Europe, the Far East and Australasia, and back to Liverpool for the special 'local' premiere of A Hard Day's Night, they brought Beatlemania with them. They couldn't help it; it was a form of real love. George would say many years later that the world used them as an excuse to go mad and then blamed it on the Beatles, but there is a parallel theory that it was time for the world to go that sort of mad - get down a bit, loosen up, and, like Uncle John in Long Tall Sally, have some fun tonight. The crowd scenes in this segment are awesome and , in retrospect awful. How did no-one get killed? The bloom of success was still fresh in the story herein.
