BBC ‘destroyed music and arts,’ says director
‘Inventor’ of music documentary to share rare footage of The Beatles and Cream during talk at festival
THE RESPECTED director Tony Palmer has accused the BBC of running down its music and arts coverage despite a promise by the outgoing Director General, Lord Hall, to protect it.
Palmer, who made some of the BBC’s most celebrated programmes of popular and classical music, including the farewell concert of the band Omnibus: Cream – The Last Concert in 1968, said: “When Tony Hall arrived at the BBC he said music was in its DNA. But where’s the evidence, apart from the Proms? He’s systematically destroyed the old music and arts department, and it has nothing to do with money – it’s a question of interest and aptitude.”
The BBC said Palmer’s accusation “simply isn’t true”, adding: “No organisation does more to promote and celebrate music and arts in the UK.”
HIS PET hate, he says, is TV presenters who describe what viewers can see for themselves – but Tony Palmer is breaking the habit of a lifetime in Harrogate next week.
The revered filmmaker, arguably the inventor of the music documentary, will emerge from behind the camera to take questions from an audience on some of his rare early interviews with The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein.
He made All You Need Is Love, his seminal ITV series on the history of 20th century music, with neither presenter nor narrator, instead letting his contributors – John Lennon and Bing Crosby among them – tell their own stories. Both sent him fan letters.
The series was among more than 100 music projects he oversaw from the mid-1960s. The 1968 farewell concert of the rock band Cream – part of which will also be screened in Harrogate – was another.
“I filmed Brian Epstein in 1966 and even then, you just knew how important the Beatles were,” he said. “By the time I filmed them for All You Need Is Love in the 1970s there was no doubt.”
It had not always been thus. When Palmer wrote in a Sunday newspaper that the Beatles were the most important songwriters since Franz Schubert, people wrote to the editor to cancel their subscriptions.
“They thought it was outrageous that I had mentioned The Beatles and Schubert in the same sentence. Now, it’s a perfectly reasonable comparison,” he said.
Palmer’s interview with Epstein’s mother, Queenie, after her son’s death, is the only one she ever gave, and is included in the footage he is taking to Harrogate.
“It was the first film about The Beatles which they allowed to be made by anyone other than themselves,” said Palmer, who is now 78 and the only person outside the band’s inner circle to have written the sleeve notes for one of their albums.
“As a result, Paul and John gave me all kinds of material, which they didn’t include even when they produced their ginormous Anthology series.” Lennon also gave him the series title – which he later discovered The Beatles had neglected to trademark. “Two other people had registered it instead – a brothel in Amsterdam, and a maker of lingerie in Hong Kong,” he said.
The footage of Cream, shot at the Royal Albert Hall with early colour equipment – “on video tape no one knew how to edit” – was not only a musical but a diplomatic triumph. “The last rock ’n’ roll act there had been Bill Haley and the Comets, and the fans tore up the seats,” Palmer said. “I had to put on a tie and talk them into letting another rock band inside.”
He is still working on new films but deplores the present fashion to explain everything to viewers.
“The audience is not stupid – they’re perfectly able to watch quite a complicated film about something,” he said.
They thought it outrageous I mentioned The Beatles and Schubert together.
Filmmaker Tony Palmer.