The new film discussed technical issues hampering the surviving Beatles’ intention to rework Now and Then in the mid-90s as well: there were meant to be three “new” Beatles songs, one for each volume of the Anthology compilations, but the sessions for this song were abandoned as Lennon’s vocals and piano couldn’t be separated for the new mix. Everyone involved had clearly done their best with the technology available but there was no getting around the fact that Lennon’s voice sounded ghostly. Moreover, the overdubbed recordings had an eerie, uncanny valley quality. Perhaps it was stymied by Radio 1’s disinclination to play it, which led Paul McCartney to pen an angry article in the Daily Mirror, decrying the station’s “kindergarten kings”: whatever your take on the issue, there was something a bit unedifying about the Beatles’ return ending with Macca fulminating about Radio 1’s ageism à la Status Quo. Real Love, meanwhile, managed a couple of weeks in the Top 10 before disappearing (by week two, Boyzone were outselling that as well). And yet Free as a Bird – clearly released with the intention of bagging the Christmas No 1 spot, as the Beatles regularly did in the 60s – couldn’t dislodge Michael Jackson’s Earth Song from the top: by its second week in the charts, it was being outsold not just by Jackson, but Boyzone’s cover of Cat Stevens’ Father and Son. It was the height of Britpop, the Beatles’ stock higher – and their influence on current music more obvious – than at any point since their split. It talked about the surviving Beatles’ initial attempts to work up John Lennon’s late 70s demos in the mid-90s, but didn’t mention the slightly muted response the completed versions of Free as a Bird and Real Love received. It was brief and rather moving, but it offered a tactfully bowdlerised version of events, understandably stepping around the parts of the story that might cause anyone to regard Now and Then with a wary eye. Last night, BBC One shifted its schedules to broadcast a film about the making of the “final” Beatles single, Now and Then.

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