The Beatles Anthology
Season 1
TV-PG
This series is a documentary on the life and times of the Beatles. It features clips from many of their songs as well as in-depth descriptions of their songs, tours, and lives.
Where to Watch Season 1
8 Episodes
- July '40 to March '63
E1July '40 to March '63This 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. - March '63 to February '64
E2March '63 to February '64The 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. - July '66 to June '67
E6July '66 to June '67The glory of this story is that if you didn't know it, the surprises are truly astonishing and if you do, the delight is in the detail and this episode contains so many astonishing advances and reverses, setbacks and recoveries and in such quick-time that in fiction many of them would have been edited out. Our heroes 'snub' Mrs. Marcos of Manila and a nation's fury turns on them after three years of world-at-their-feet. Then it is thought John suggested in an interview that they are more important than Jesus. He explains himself, but too late to prevent Third Reich-style pubic burnings of their work. They live this down but retire from touring and go into the studio which brings an amazed world the might whirligig of Sgt. Pepper, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields here on the screen in surreal and glorious colour. They sing Baby You're A Rich Man, and they all are, but they don't buy an island in Greece. That is about the only crazy thing that doesn't happen in this episode. - July '68 to The End
E8July '68 to The EndAll things must pass, as the man said in this final episode, things are passing strange and fairly fast. The music holds out till the end (as good as gold, as good as ever better even, some might say, bearing in mind the quality of Abbey Road, which ends this stunning story) and the Beatles, having worked through the White album, Let It Be, Hey Jude and Revolution, two weddings, two busts an the rooftop concert equal Gilbert and Sullivan in the level of acrimony and the heightened quality of the work that was done through it and despite it all. The Beatles have survived their success and survived their era to remain modern, timeless and supreme against all comers. Paul, George and Ringo can still sit around a table and relive the twentieth century's greatest romance. This final tape evades nothing and reveals the rents and splits that ended their 60's life together but it cannot avoid encouraging all of us to believe in magic.
