THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY: The flammed together ‘new episode’ feels totally pointless.

The problem is, the new episode isn’t all-new at all. It’s essentially the bonus material from the 2003 DVD edition of Anthology padded out to 50 minutes: the three surviving Beatles being interviewed together at George Harrison’s home and at Abbey Road, loosely jamming old rock’n’roll songs – and an early McCartney effort, Thinking of Linking – on acoustic guitars and ukuleles; working on the new tracks at Paul McCartney’s home studio with producer Jeff Lynne; and sitting at a mixing desk while George Martin plays them multitrack recordings from the 60s.

Some of the footage is sweet – there’s a lovely moment where Ringo addresses his bandmates with a plaintive “I like hanging out with you guys” – and some of it is oddly telling: you could divine a lot from George Harrison’s visible exasperation as the sessions for Free as a Bird and Real Love drag on. (Off camera, he famously refused to work on a third Lennon demo, Now and Then, deeming it “fucking rubbish”. McCartney and Starr eventually finished the track in 2023, 22 years after Harrison’s death.)

To be fair, in the 1990s, the technology just wasn’t there to separate Lennon’s voice from his piano, and reduce the noise from recording demos on a pair of cassette recorders in the Dakota Building. Lennon’s “Now and Then” is a wisp of a song, but today’s track separation and audio restoration technology at least allowed McCartney, Starr and Giles Martin to mount a killer arrangement and production on top of Lennon’s demo.

But as Alexander Larman asks, regarding the new Anthology album at the Spectator: When will the Beatles bandwagon end? “I can’t help thinking – allied to the underwhelm of ‘Now and Then’ – that, for the first time, the sheer accumulation of detail and trivia runs the risk of letting daylight in upon magic, and making the Beatles seem, well, ordinary – which is something that they never were, or never could be. Perhaps McCartney and Ringo, who are both awaiting the Sam Mendes-directed films about each member of the band – expected in 2028 – might be advised to step in and say, ‘Right lads, enough is enough’, and to let the whole, magnificent enterprise rest in dignity. You might even say that it was time to let it be.”