Meet The Beatles

Our history teacher used to make fun of Magnus Magnusson. Of the show he became synonymous with. Mastermind. The rote learning of facts to score the most points on a quiz show.

To know everything and understand nothing, as he might’ve seen it.

The wife of the deputy head, Mr Alves, was a contestant on Mastermind. Mr Alves taught geography. Geography teachers often seemed to have a secondary role. Deputy head. P.E. teacher. As though geography alone was never quite enough.

Everyone’s favourite geography teacher was Mr Martin. ‘Doc’ Martin. On the morning after John Lennon was shot, he was teaching us a lesson that involved New York. On the board he’d drawn an outline of Central Park and somewhere within he’d added an arrow pointing to the body of John Lennon.

Not to make fun of what had happened, but just a passing reference to what at the time was simply one more piece of topical news.

The Beatles are a cultural curve. They peaked in the late 60s and then once they’d split their stock slowly waned. John Lennon mostly stopped making music. George Harrison spilled out all his unrealised works into a vast triple album and then faded from view. Ringo had some jaunty hits. Paul McCartney became mostly a watered down version of Paul McCartney.

The Beatles were at the bottom of their cultural curve when Lennon died. Punk had swept away the old music. Some of the bands that came after offered a recognisable nod to the Fab Four (Echo & The Bunnymen, for one), but there was a lot of new stuff that existed in a whole other universe. Lennon finally broke his silence with what at the time was dismissed as a rather insipid comeback. Thanks for turning up, but you know…

His death was a ripple, the manner of it as much as anything, but it didn’t have the cultural heft of say Princess Diana a decade and some later.

The Beatles curve has tipped upwards ever since. In fact now it’s probably stretching way beyond that 60s peak. Paul McCartney is a national treasure. The Get Back documentary fed the feverish interest of a million fans – old and new. The band has its place in the cultural history of this country as securely as Dickens or Shakespeare.

It’s 2026. We still have Mastermind. We still celebrate that rote learning of facts. But most of my teachers have gone now. Consigned to history. I don’t think the wife of Mr Alves progressed far on the show. And today if you suggested The Beatles as your specialist subject, the producers might gently suggest you try something more original.

Online The Beatles are big business. If you’re not spreading hoaxes and conspiracy theories, or battling ideologies that are stuck grimly in their left or right lanes, then you’re revisiting every corner of that 60s behemoth.

George Harrison was the best Beatle. That was agreed for a while. And then along came the contrarians. All he contributed to the band were a slender few songs. Take away his work on Abbey Road and what did it amount to?

The White Album was great - or shite.  No one can like Revolution 9 – if you say you do, it’s only for show. People on the internet love to tell you what you’re thinking. It’s a sign of the times.

Who was the best Beatle? It was John, naturally. And Paul. And George. And Ringo. Because if you took any one of them away, it would no longer be The Beatles. But social media doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to pick a side. (And every cultural icon has a skeleton in their closet, but we’ll probably wait until their death before we proudly exhibit it to the world).

Let’s not mourn the past. Lennon or my history teacher or a woman I never knew who was married to the deputy head of my high school. There’s nothing wrong in listening to The Beatles or being fascinated by their history. But there’s also so much more to the world, so many new ways to form music or reframe that same small collection of notes we’ve lived with all our lives.

Embrace the past, know your history and where you came from, but don’t then spend the present arguing about it with faceless strangers, until all the pixels on your phone gently bleed into each other and the Earth is finally consumed by the sun.

Or to put it another way: Let it be.