This is the essential argument of Magical Mystery Tour Revisited, an Arena programme that will be screened next week, just as a spruced-up version of the film, complete with outtakes and a commentary from McCartney, is released on DVD. Magical Mystery Tour is a kind of acid-rock, 1967 version of that.' The big point for me was when I saw Un Chien Andalou, the Buñuel and Dalí film, at much the same time.

You could have the avant garde of Antonioni at one end, where everything would be perfectly orchestrated and fashioned and, down at the other end, you've got Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, or William Burroughs. Talking me through a film still seen by many as a yawn-inducing mish-mash, Wall reels off some lofty reference points. It's taken all this time for it to be reassessed.' To say you liked Magical Mystery Tour was almost an indication that there was something wrong with you. It was the same thing as Carry On films and spaghetti westerns being regarded with absolute contempt – whereas they're now seen as masterpieces.

Wall goes on: 'For years, you had to be a bit trepidatious about saying you liked Magical Mystery Tour. 'I can remember looking back at my mother and the neighbours, who were saying, 'Absolutely shocking – outrageous.'' 'I am that textbook 16-year-old who sat there in the front room, with the indoor aerial in one hand, thinking I was watching something completely wondrous,' he says. At his home in south London, he sat watching Magical Mystery Tour with his family and some neighbours, whose angry bafflement was of a piece with what would pour forth the next day. Only the Guardian offered any respite, praising 'an inspired freewheeling achievement … a kind of fantasy morality play about the grossness, warmth and stupidity of the (Beatles') audience'.Īnthony Wall, editor of the BBC arts programme Arena since 1985, was in his mid-teens back then. In the States, NBC cancelled an agreement to show the film on its broadcastleaving a print of it to be passed round US universities it would not be shown again in Britain for over a decade. The Express called it 'tasteless nonsense' and 'blatant rubbish'.

'Beatles mystery tour baffles viewers' was the headline in the Mirror, flagging up claims that 'by the thousand, viewers protested to the BBC'. This rum turn of events, only a few months after the death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, has long been seen as the Beatles' one true disaster. Indeed, history records that the BBC's so-called reaction index – a number arrived at after quizzing viewers about what they had seen – scored its lowest-ever rating: 23 out of 100. It went out on Boxing Day at 8.35pm and 15 million people tuned in – but, presented with a bamboozling melange of unconnected scenes, often shakily shot and seemingly stuck together at random, most were not best pleased. Just over three months later, after further filming at a Kent airfield, BBC1 screened the hour-long film the Beatles titled Magical Mystery Tour.

Magical mystery tour album