Starkey (Ringo Starr, his character sharing the drummer’s real name) and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins), who argue incessantly, join a “mystery tour”, a coach trip with no known destination and among the other tourists are the other Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison). The band combined this with the popular day trips from Liverpool by coach to see the illuminations at Blackpool but neglected to come up with anything even remotely resembling a script, turning up on the first day of shooting with just a half-formed ideas scribbled on sheets of paper. The Pranksters toured the States in the psychedelic International Harvester school bus, handing of then still-legal LSD and getting high on various other substances as they went. The project was instigated by Paul McCartney who was inspired by Ken Kesey’s madcap expeditions, a trip (in every sense of the word) across America by Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters” aboard a bus christened Further in 1964. Lester might have brought some much needed shape to the chaos of a film that was shot without a script and semi-improvised. It’s obvious from the end result that they really fancied themselves on a par with Lester but, although they were undeniably geniuses when it came to popular music, film-making clearly wasn’t their forte.
If The Beatles’ previous screen outing, Help! (1965) had been a bit of a narrative mess, it was a model of tightly plotted writing compared to the freewheeling, semi-improvised lunacy of Magical Mystery Tour, a television film first broadcast on 26 December 1967 (just short of a year to the day after Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland (1966), an outlier in psychedelia’s invasion of British television which would give rise to such surreal favourites as The Prisoner (1967-1968), Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967-1969), Theatre 625: The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) and Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974) among others).ĭisenchanted with film-making after Help! (on which John Lennon felt that the band were just extras in their own film) The Beatles decided to strike out on their own and direct themselves, severing their fruitful ties with Richard Lester who had directed both Help! and its predecessor A Hard Day’s Night (1964).
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