Which of the Beatles would you most like to have been? Not either of the dead ones, presumably. Nor the one continually derided for his alleged lack of talent. Definitely not the embarrassing, gurning, two-thumbs-up uncool one…
Anyway, it’s a trick question. The correct answer, at least it is for me after watching The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC4, Friday), is Pete Best — the drummer who got ousted just before the band got big because he was too good-looking, too quiet and, some say, because Brian Epstein couldn’t handle his mum’s pushiness.
Best, I’d always imagined, was the unluckiest man in history. So when he was featured on the documentary talking fondly about the Hamburg years and about how John Lennon was always his hero, I kept waiting for the bit where his throat cracked, his eyes misted up and he looked away from the camera, temporarily unable to continue.
Not a bit of it. Best, it turns out, remains a twinkly-eyed, cheery cove, more than reconciled to his place as a footnote in history, delighted to have spent his recent career — after a 20-year stint in the civil service — as a touring musician playing the kind of raw rock’n’roll the band did in Hamburg. Possibly the £1 million or so he got in royalties from the Beatles’ Anthology 1 helped. Even so, as an exemplar of triumph over adversity, enduring happiness snatched from transient misery, Best does seem a pretty useful role model for all those of us who don’t even have a ‘Yellow Submarine’ in them, let alone an ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or a ‘A Day In the Life’.
There have been innumerable documentaries about the Beatles and I dare say there was nothing in this one that more obsessive aficionados wouldn’t have known already.
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