how the beatles rocked the kremlin
9
summer’s night in 1962. My drinking companion was a jaunty young man with the eyes of a spaniel, implacably confident of its charm. He was keen to hear about television, I was more interested in what he did. His name, I gathered, was Paul McCartney. I had been working at Granada Television in Manchester for just a few months. As a very raw researcher on a local TV show, I felt underequipped with evidence of TV glamour. It struck me that the startling performance by Paul and his chums that evening in a nearby cellar was easily the most exotic thing I’d come across in my brief and unspectacular showbiz career. I was still feeling a bit stunned by the banquet of noise the four unknowns had served up in that cellar. I was aware that the sharp one called John would probably have a withering put-down, ready to pounce if I tried to impersonate a media fast-tracker. I mumbled something humble in reply to Paul’s inquiry about my glamorous life, and bought the embryonic Fab Four some more beers. My regular research beat involved persuading worthies and eccentrics, local officials or champion knitters to come into the studio for the early evening magazine show People and Places. My greatest coup to date had been managing to borrow the waxwork head of a recently executed murderer for the program, but the producer got cold feet and insisted that I return it. Recently things had begun looking up a bit. I had been teamed with a bright young director and assigned to make a series of little films—three or four minutes at most—featuring the old and the new in our region of Northern England under the stolid title Know Your North. The notion was, I suppose, a faint hint of the stampede of change that was soon to invade the Britain of the early sixties. I was sent off to track down a crusty old cobbler who still made traditional clogs in a damp shed, and then pair him with a man building a chain of electricity pylons across the Pennine Moors. There had been other odd couplings: an old-style toffee maker and a gay young man designing frocks in a terraced house.