To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of Love Me Do on 5 October, BBC regional
radio producers have been making a series of documentaries about the Fab Four
and their links to the various local areas.
Radio Solent has signed up none other than British
broadcasting legend Tony Blackburn, born in Poole and a mainstay of Bournemouth’s
beat group scene in the early 1960s before he became the first DJ to play a
record on Radio 1 in 1967, to present an hour-long documentary, The Beatles in the South.
Bournemouth features prominently in that story and several
of the interviewees featured in Yeah Yeah
Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth, as well as author Nick Churchill, have
contributed to the programme.
BBC South Today presenter
Alex Dyke also spoke to Nick and several others for a series of films to be
broadcast on BBC One over four days leading up to the Radio Solent documentary
on Friday, October 5.
The whole project sounds fascinating and it would be good to
think the BBC will somehow make a compilation of programmes available – these are
predominately fans’ stories and previously untold anecdotes from people whose
paths happened to cross the unstoppable force of Beatlemania in the early 1960s.
One of the stories to feature in the first of the South
Today films is the episode in which The Beatles were accidentally trapped outside
the Gaumont Theatre, Bournemouth on 2 August 1964 as captured in this photo
from the Evening Echo.
‘Earlier in
the day the Echo photographer had caught the group escaping from a crush of
fans after being locked out of the Gaumont. The confusion arose as a result of
the management’s attempt to throw fans off the scent by posting most of the
police guard outside the main emergency exit in Hinton Road, leaving the lower
emergency exit clear to admit The Beatles. The scheme would have worked, but
nobody had told the doorman inside so while the message to unlock the door was
relayed, the star attractions were trapped outside.’
Extract from
Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles &
Bournemouth. Available to order from www.beatlesandbournemouth.com.
