Help!: a new film imagines the unthinkable,
THE BEATLES Counterfactual is a long, self-sustaining tradition, reimagining the post-War world’s cultural relief map without (arguably) its most seismic event. What if The Beatles had never formed? Or split in 1962? What would music, or politics even, be like? What if Paul really was dead? Or Lennon lived?
Or how about, The Beatles did exist, but after a mysterious, reality-rearranging ‘event’, only one person in the whole world (who luckily, happens to be a musician) remembers them and their songs? The idea is the nub of a new movie, written by Blackadder/Four Weddings’ Richard Curtis from an idea by Jack Barth. Directed by Danny Boyle and starring former EastEnders star Himesh Patel, it’s a feelgood family romcom set in a world identical to our own (even post‘event’), not the sci-fi dystopia that a super-invested Beatles fan might hallucinate.
“I wasn’t so concerned with the impact of The Beatles on global culture,” Curtis tells MOJO, “apart from one joke about Oasis not existing. It’s more about the joy of rediscovery than it is the removal, or how young people might still be imprisoned in some
way. It’s, What would people make of the songs? Would they go down as well?”
Curtis decided that on hearing Beatles songs for the first time, faithfully sung by an unassuming Anglo-Asian boy-man from Suffolk, people would go nuts.
“Beatles records are these Fabergé eggs of perfection,” he says. “But I suppose we’re saying that even without the production, the tunes are sufficiently amazing to have caught people’s ears.”
In the movie, Patel’s Jack Malick leaps from musical obscurity with a repertoire plagiarised from a band who never existed. Curtis’s Suffolk neighbour Ed Sheeran, playing himself, lends the up-and-comer a hand, game enough to acknowledge that Hey Jude et al. blow even his best stuff out of the water. “In a way, Jack’s story is Ed’s story,” says Curtis. “Banging around every small agricultural fair in Norfolk and Suffolk, then becoming this enormous star.”
As an eight-year-old, in Stockholm in 1964, Curtis waited three consecutive nights outside the Foresta Hotel for the Fabs to step out and wave, and he says Beatle values (“love, friendship, funny”) have informed all his film work. “They were a sort of glue,” he ponders. “They were something the older generation had to acknowledge that the younger generation had got right. The ’50s was a stolid, unhappy decade, gloomy, too-formal, trapped in the past and The Beatles opened it up.”
MOJO readers must decide if a movie that ignores broader implications of Beatle loss is for them. The hardest thing to deliver – affecting, not affected versions of Beatles songs sung by an actor – it delivers. But too much pondering timelines and paradoxes – as when the most Beatlecentric moment (we won’t spoil it but it is mind-boggling) is revealed – will end in tears. For instance, how would Curtis describe the phenomenon that wipes The Beatles from history? “Not very well!” he chuckles. “It’s something physical but also psychological, like a short circuit. But to be honest, I haven’t thought it through enough and I’m hoping that people won’t either.”
“It’s about the joy of rediscovery.” RICHARD CURTIS.