HE HAD A TICKET TO WRITE

The original script was written by a team of Americans – one of them, Erich Segal, was a professor of Greek at Harvard, as well as author of the classic 1970 weepie Love Story. Unsurprisingly, The Beatles didn’t think the characters sounded like them. So Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough – who was in Merseybeat band The Scaffold (Lily The Pink) – was hired to ‘give authentic voice to The Beatles’, says McGough, ‘because what they were currently speaking was Woody Allen meets Plato. I ended up writing the first scenes so, all the puns: “I’m a real lever puller [Liverpooler]… Frankenstein? I went out with his sister, Phyllis…”’ But contractual wrangling meant McGough was never credited for his work. Still, at least he was paid for his efforts: £500, which is £6,000 in today’s money. A not insignificant sum for a geography teacher turned-poet in 1968.