The BBC just can't stop showing that flipping Lennon Naked drama. No sooner have we emerged from the Fatherhood Season, where it first appeared, than we're into a John Lennon Night on BBC Four, featuring Lennon Naked again under a new temporary flag of convenience.
It wasn't memorialised in HD. But last night Ringo Starr turned 70 and welcomed Paul McCartney onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York for a musical celebration. There was only one song they were going to perform, and a thousand mobile phone cameras were duly held aloft to capture it. The results have sprouted overnight on YouTube, and they all have the grainy shakycam quality of all that old footage from the Cavern Club.
No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have barely been off the stage in productions all over the world.
Films about rock stars usually fail, because it's impossible to recreate whatever larger-than-life qualities made them unique and famous in the first place. You frequently end up with a slightly embarrassing party-piece impersonation that captures some of the mannerisms but misses the essence of the character.
This week’s birthday videos include guitarists Andrés Segovia playing a fandango, Japanese heavy metal hero Akira Takasaki and George Harrison. Then there’s Johnny Cash and murdered Afghan singer Nusrat Parsa. It's also the birthday of the mighty Handel. Videos below.
It’s been a very good year for Beatlemania, with all the albums re-repackaged and the group going virtual in Rock Band. The BBC lobbed in their own Beatles season-ette, and one of the more striking images from their riot of documentary footage was of John Lennon escorting his Aunt Mimi up the steps onto the plane taking them to America, with her handbag and Sunday-best hat.
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday.