You don’t realise that you’re knocking on a bit until some delectable young woman on the Tube stands up and offers you her place. “What, me?” your smile tries to joke, as you pull yourself immediately more athletically upright. “No thank you. How strange that you should think I might be so old. It must be the white hair. A family trait. I’ve had it since…oh, just the other day when I was forty. And, besides, don’t you know that seventy is said to be the perfect age these days…”

Can that be true?  The perfect life at 70? Well, that’s what a British Airways survey of financial advisers has found. With our pensions, free local travel, valuable homes with mortgages paid off, those of us who are around the three score years and ten mark are apparently the most fortunate generation in the country.

From a purely financial perspective – and remembering that there will be many without generous pensions, a good bus service or a home of their own – there’s probably some truth in this But what about life in the round?

When in 1968 Simon and Garfunkel (now both 70) sang “How terribly strange to be seventy” in their song Old Friends, it struck a nerve with baby boomers everywhere. Yes, how odd it must be to be old, we all thought. Not “strange” so much as terrible and unimaginable.

Yet here we all are, and seventy isn’t strange at all. It isn’t old either, not any more, if we judge age by mental faculties and overall health. Actually, it’s terrific. I’m 71, but sometimes feel as though those numbers are back to front, in that the passions I enjoyed at 17 still guide and lighten my life. Indeed one obsession of my life back then, rock music, went on to become a major plank of my career.

I suppose, not having had a regular salary since I was 31, I probably haven’t stored up as much treasure for my dotage as one of those financial experts would have advised – so I still have a mortgage, although I’ve done all right. But, born absolutely at the right time, I’ve had, and still, have, like so many of my age mates, the luckiest of lives.

Nursed by the National Health Service, educated free of charge up to university level, with a student living grant included – this must sound like Utopia now to debt burdened undergraduates. And it only got better. With jobs available for the asking in the Sixties, I had my first Fleet Street column at 26 and was able to buy our first house at the same age. God couldn’t have been kinder.

I was even too young for National Service so I never had to fight any foreign wars, the only minor scars I’ve got being the easily fixed results of too much sun bathing on Mediterranean holidays. I remember my grandparents. They were old and worn at seventy. But they’d had hard lives, never been abroad, and, by the time I was aware of them, shuffling around, exhausted. This summer we’ll take our grandchildren once more on a bucket and spade holiday to France, where I will every day play football for hours on the beach with my grandson.

He’s eleven so he’ll always beat me, and I know my knee will ache a bit, but if this is my second childhood, bring it on, because I’m hardly a case of Shakespeare’s “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.  Actually, for those interested, I’ve got all my gnashers, bar one tricky wisdom tooth – a benefit, no doubt, of the rationing of sweets during the war.

Obviously there are some things you can’t do after 70, and every year I regret never having run in the marathon. I was always too busy (or lazy) to train, and it’s probably a bit late to start now.  And I’m long used to being invisible when in the company of beautiful women – apart from the aforesaid occasional one on the Tube who takes pity on me.

But for every loss there’s also a gain. Youth can be hasty, all energy, instant decisions and quick judgements. It seems to me that age brings a greater tolerance, a wider perspective and maybe a rediscovered innocence.

As usual, for my generation, Bob Dylan (aged 70) summed this up best when he famously sang of a reflective maturity following his ever-protesting youthful days with his line: “For I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.  Which is exactly how I feel – hopefully just a little bit wiser and more forgiving than once I was.

At 71 I’m not young, but certainly I don’t feel old, and, as I cross my fingers for continued good health, grateful that my generation have been the beneficiaries of the sacrifices of our parents, I hope to write every day until I drop.The pensions and free travel aren’t bad either.

Ray Connolly’s novel Shadows On A Wall is now available as an eBook on Amazon.

You only had to see the audience, predominantly female, swaying and singing together in their massed legions at Adele’s televised Royal Albert Hall concert last week, to know where the big money is in young British pop music these days. It’s in the bank accounts of the top half dozen girl singers in the country.

And why? Because more than at any time in the history of popular music the various factors which govern pop fame, and therefore wealth, are coming together to create glamorous, seemingly strong female stars with whom a generation nor two of confident, independent girls and young women can identify.

When Adele sings Rolling In The Deep, yet another song of hers about a relationship that went wrong, she’s touching a worldwide nerve – not the traditional one of the pleading, girl supplicant, but that of the tough, young survivor who’s knocked around a bit, and, sadder but wiser, knows the score.

An awful lot of girls recognise that feeling, and there’s Adele, up there on stage and screen, the friend, who, unlike a fella, won’t let them down.

Adele has, of course, a fantastic voice, which explains why, at 23, she’s already worth around twenty million pounds – making her far and away a wealthier lady than the five runners up in the latest Sunday Times Rich List of music stars under thirty.

But, with Cheryl Cole, Leona Lewis and Katie Melua each sitting on around twelve million, and with eleven of the top fifteen young earners in music being women, something as well as music must be happening.

A large part of that something, it seems to me, is television. Yes, I know that Adele, Jessie J and Leona Lewis are all alumnae of the BRIT School in Croydon that educates and brings on young artists. So, full marks to that establishment in spotting the talent and then shaping it.

But these days, more than at any other time, new talent has to be seen on television to take off – and it was on those Saturday evening Simon Cowell-type television shows, with, I suspect, their largely female viewers, that we all first got to know Jessie J and Leona Lewis; and where Cheryl Cole, formerly of Girls Aloud, continues to financially flourish.

Once upon a time people listened to music with their ears pressed to the radio or record player. Now, in this post-MTV age of the image, it would appear they listen equally with their eyes, and it can’t escape anyone’s notice that Jessie J, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua and Duffy are all lookers, packaged for their glamour as well as their singing.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Elvis, Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney weren’t exactly ugly, but back in pre-history girl pop fans saw male rock stars in terms of fantasy boy friends. Young Western women’s attitudes to life and its possibilities, have happily changed massively since then.

The Spice Girls tapped into this fifteen years ago with what they called “girl power”. But the Spice Girls were dressing up as, and behaving like, little girls who were pretending to be big girls. Today’s generation of performers suggest a sexual maturity, and perhaps a certain world weariness and self knowledge, that the Spice Girls never showed.

But, you may be wondering, what’s happened to all the young male stars who used to command such devotion? Where are the Mick Jaggers and David Bowies of today? The truth is, in an industry that is endlessly self replicating, it’s more difficult for them than at any time.

After the Sixties, male guitar groups, like gangs of outlaws, were dominant for decades, and you had thousands upon thousands of bands fighting it out with each another – here and in America, and nothing like so many girl singers.

Eventually solo singers like James Blunt emerged and for the next few years the charts were filled with blokes with distinctive voices, right up to Craig David and Paulo Nutini, who, though today’s top male earners, are relative paupers worth only eight million apiece.

But the impetus in the modern world was with the girls. Along came Beyonce in America, and Amy Winehouse and Adele in the UK, music fashions changed, and the scramble was on in the record business to find more retro-inspired female solo acts, in the tradition of Dusty Springfield. You only have to turn on television to see how successful that formula has been.

Will it continue? Will our musical boys continue to be eclipsed and pushed out of the spotlight by these talented young women, having to content themselves in the back room by being merely producers and co-writers for stars like Adele?

It depends. The locomotive of a new male sensation could change a lot. But for the time being the demographics are with the girls. They’ve changed. Their audience has changed. And it’s their time.

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The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, a collection of his journalism about the Beatles, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

There are many advantages in having a supremely talented and successful parent. Money is rarely a problem, and family access to those who might be helpful in a career cuts a lot of corners. But, when Paul McCartney’s only son, James, let slip this week that he and some of the sons of the other three Beatles had discussed getting together to form a second generation Fab Four, it occurred that the gods of fortune might be playing games with them.

It’s easy to see why such a venture might appeal. Young McCartney, Sean Lennon, Dhani Harrison and Jason Starkey (the sons of John, George and Ringo) have all grown up watching from the wings of global fame, seeing their fathers as dads to them but worldwide icons to everybody else. And it can’t always have been easy.

Not surprisingly, like many children born into musically creative homes, they all learned instruments and became competent musicians. What could be more natural, therefore, that, finding themselves in the somewhat unique club of being always identified in relation to their four impossibly famous fathers, they should want to get together? They have so much in common. What could go wrong?

Actually, everything. Because no matter how talented these young men are, and James McCartney got encouraging reviews when he appeared solo at his dad’s old stomping ground of Liverpool’s Cavern on Tuesday night, as Second Generation Beatles they can only fail by comparison with their dads.

If they want to play together privately to entertain themselves and their friends, that would be terrific. Go for it, fellas.

But the public glare can be cruel. The brickbats could be vicious. The Beatles weren’t just common or garden rock stars. Forged by the accidental cross seeding of extraordinary talents in a post war environment of social change, their grip on the world’s imagination cannot be replicated. All the elements that came together then and helped create them and their myth cannot recur.

Wisely, after having been broken up by their founder John Lennon in 1969 at the very height of their fame, the Beatles were never tempted to reunite, despite a begging world and tens of millions of dollars being offered. They knew it wouldn’t, couldn’t, be the same – that only disappointment for the fans lay down that particular road.

What chance then that a late blooming by their sons, already in their thirties and older than the Beatles were when they broke up, would be anything more than a dynastic circus of warped nostalgia.

Simply by choosing careers as musicians the four have already sorely tempted fate. Sean Lennon has made several records, but can anyone hum just one of his songs? His elder half brother, Julian, who will be 50 in a few weeks time, had a couple of hits in the year after his father was murdered, but that was a long time ago. Actually, not seeing his name in the proposed line-up of the new Fabs, makes one wonder how left out he must, once again, be feeling today.

Success being passed from one generation to the next in rock music is not completely unknown, but it is rare. Ringo Starr’s eldest son, Zak, has made a successful, though rarely publicised, career, drumming with bands like the Who and Oasis. But he is the exception.

Lisa Marie Presley might have assumed that because she was a woman she wouldn’t be compared with her father. Some hope! When, by the grace of technology, she made a video singing a duet with dead Elvis, one reviewer wrote that unfortunately she had inherited her dad’s looks but her mother’s voice.

Of course wanting to follow in the profession of one’s parents happens in many homes. It makes sense. We all learn most from our parents, so there should be no surprise that careers in medicine, the law, theatre and even journalism seem to be in the DNA of some families, while Hollywood is stuffed with the sons and daughters of movie stars.

But, putting aside the Dimblebys in television, Michael Douglas, son of Kirk, in movies, and the acting Redgraves, few children have the popular success of the starriest parents. For example the sons of Tom Jones and Michael Parkinson prefer to manage their fathers’ careers than pursue the limelight themselves, taking background jobs that don’t reply on the ever fluctuating whim of public taste or that impossible to recreate flicker of charisma.

How wise, too, was Stella McCartney to go into fashion, David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones into movie making and Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, into writing. She may have begun adult life acting as Princess Leia in Star Wars, but it’s for her books and screenplays that Carrie Fisher is best known and most admired.

The contacts with which all three grew up inevitably helped, but by choosing different careers they’ve all emerged from under the potentially suffocating blanket of comparison, and become successful in their own rights.

Sixty years ago Noel Coward told Mrs Worthington in song not to put her daughter on the stage. It was good advice, that others might heed. Some acts, the Beatles more than any other, are just impossible to follow.

The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, a collection of his journalism about the Beatles, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

When the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was released in 1967 at the very height of their fame, it was a wonder of its age – and not only for its songs.

Almost as important was its packaging – that ornate, folding sleeve that showed the four Beatles in fancy dress at the centre of a flowery, hippy montage of characters from Karl Marx to Bob Dylan, Oscar Wilde and Laurel and Hardy.

The most expensive and famous cover ever designed, it was to change the art work on albums for ever, as well as bringing everlasting renown to its designer, pop artist Peter Blake. Unfortunately it didn’t also bring him commensurate remuneration, in that, as the agent who negotiated for him was high on pot at the time, Blake only received a £200 fee.

Oh, well, it was the Sixties!

In a few weeks time Blake will be 80, and to celebrate his birthday he’s designed a new Sgt Pepper cover, 2012 style, replacing the original images, including those of the Beatles, with old friends and people he admires and whom he believes celebrate British culture.

It’s a terrific idea, claiming back an idea that he so cheaply sold. But his choice of the people portrayed in his new montage is where he and I might not completely agree. In fact, some of his choices are decidedly rum. Understandably, being an artist, the visual arts, and especially fashion, figure prominently, so I’ve no particular grumble here.

It’s nice, if surprising, to see Justin de Villeneuve again, Twiggy’s forgotten former manager and boy friend, and, despite her Olympic team designs, Stella McCartney isn’t unwelcome. Nor are film directors Ridley Scott and Alfred Hitchcock.

Presumably, though, sculptor Anish Kapoor and the artist-in-the-frock Grayson Perry only made the cut because they are good mates with Peter Blake. Fair enough, I suppose.

What really puzzles me, though, is the plethora of restaurateurs and chefs. I know the entire nation has gone potty about food, with the endless succession of books and TV programmes (so cheap to make) about eating, but are the late Fanny Craddock, Mr Chow, Rick Stein and three other kitchen potentates all really icons of British culture. Or are they just cooks with big hats?

It’s all personal, of course. It has to be in any list that includes Tommy Steele and Shirley Bassey. But sometimes Blake’s choices seem just plain random.

How could he choose Mick Jagger without Keith Richards, when we all know that without those Richards’ guitar riffs Mick Jagger might well have stayed at university and ended up running a City bank?

Surprisingly, because I know Blake was interested in wrestling for a time, what is completely missing from the new montage are sporting heroes, although boxer Sonny Liston was in the original. There’s no David Beckham or my own favourite footballer, the ever reasonable John Barnes – and not even Bobby Moore who gifted the nation with the only World Cup we’ve ever won.

He might even have found a place here for comedian Eddie Izzard, if only for his heroic, long distance walking feat for charity, or Lewis Hamilton for his Formula One exploits.

And while the playwrights Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan are all included, with the exception of children’s authors JK Rowling and Roald Dahl, there are few novelists.

What about David Nicholls, whose brilliant novel One Day became an admittedly unbrilliant movie, or Helen Fielding who tapped into the minds of a generation of women and invented Bridget Jones. Then there’s Robert Harris, Sue Townsend, the one-off and very brave Terry Pratchett, and the wonderful graphic artist Posy Simmonds. All these, and Michael Morpugno, the man who wrote War Horse, would have made my list.

The original Sgt Pepper included several comedians, but with the exception of Nick Park, whom everyone admires for his creation of Wallace And Gromit, and Richard Curtis, who gave us Black Adder, Four Weddings And A Funeral, and much else, there aren’t any intentionally funny people.

Which is surprising because one of the things we Brits particularly excel at it’s being funny. Thirty five years after Fawlty Towers we’re still laughing at John Cleese as Basil, while Jennifer Saunders’ Ab Fab creation of Edina Monsoon was wickedly inspirational. They should be there. Then there’s Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse  who’ve created whole casts of full, funny characters

To be honest, I rather like the idea that, as the Beatles company Apple have never offered to make reparation for the fact that Blake was, albeit accidentally, ripped off for his work on the original Sgt Pepper cover all those years ago, the artists puts himself and his family front and central in his new illustration. Good for him.

But, although Paul McCartney is there in the third row, surely there should have a been a place for all four Beatles, without whom Blake’s career would have been a little different. Equally, had I been doing it, I would have found a central spot for the Beatles’ producer George Martin, who did as much as almost anyone to create the Sgt Pepper album in the first place.

Obviously, as Peter Blake admits, it’s impossible to get everyone into a montage, and I suspect some of his friends might have been feeling a bit put-out when they woke up yesterday to discover that they hadn’t been included, but there are some significant gaps in his cultural spread.

I would like to have seen David Dimbleby for the way he tells loquacious Cabinet ministers to shut up on Question Time, Jeremy Paxman for his pantomime indignation when facing the froth of the mighty and powerful and Melvyn Bragg for his career long battle to bring culture to the masses.

Then there’s Gareth Malone who taught the Soldiers Wives and many children to sing, as well as Mary Portas whose Channel Four programme took a group of unemployed young people in Middleton and set up a company making lacy knickers and, in so doing, changed their lives. These people, like Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company, are inspirational, as is the telegenic scientist Brian Cox who even managed to make physics sexy – not a phrase you will often hear.

Everyone would have a different list. As I could scarcely care less about fashion, there would be no room for Peter Blake’s favourites of Vivien Westwood, Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki in mine, but we would agree on including Sir David Attenborough – although I might add his film making brother Richard, too.

And I would insist on Russell T. Davies, who has reinvented Dr Who for a new generation, and Rob Brydon, if only for Marion and Geoff, while no mosaic that captured contemporary Britain would be complete without Julia Donaldson’s creation of the Gruffalo.

Last, though by no means least, and as delightful as the former Kate Middleton is, and I think she’s lovely, it seems to me that no pictorial account of Britain is complete without the Queen. Some of my more cynical friends will mock me, but I believe she bridges generations, class (in that she’s so far removed from everyone else she’s classless) and politics. Sixty years on from her coronation, still working and probably regarded with more affection now than at any time in her reign, she is totally remarkable. She should be on anyone’s list.

I can remember when Sgt Pepper first came out, rushing to buy one of the first copies, and then sitting by my Dansette record player listening to the songs – Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, She’s Leaving Home, When I’m Sixty Four and the rest, and studying the faces on the cover, trying to make out who they all were.

I never did identify all of them, and I’m sure millions of hours have been spent by others in the same pursuit. Which, when you consider it, was an enormous contribution that an artist called Peter Blake made to all our lives forty five years ago. I hope he has a very happy birthday.

****

The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, a collection of his many interviews with the Beatles as well as articles about them, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

There’s something eerie about sitting perfectly alone in a large cinema. It’s as though something terrible has happened somewhere else and you are the only one who doesn’t know. That’s how it felt this week, anyway, as I bought my ticket and sat down to watch the new Disney epic John Carter.

I soon discovered why I was alone. John Carter is a terrible film with an incomprehensible story, ludicrous, mutton-headed characters and unspeakable dialogue, and already Disney have announced that it is likely to lose $200 million dollars so abject have been the first box office takings. From what I saw in my West London local, that figure may be an underestimation, with John Carter heading rapidly for the movie flops record book.

No amount of tall, four-armed, computer generated creatures, of gravity-less leaping, monster slaying savagery and visual homages to Star Wars and Gladiator could redeem such a complicated farrago of boring daftness.

But how did it get like this? Nobody sets out to make a flop. At the start of shooting of any film, everyone involved is filled with hope and expectation about the wonderful entertainment they are about to create, about the prizes they might win and the money they might make.

That would have been how it was when Disney gave the green light to invest a total of $350 million dollars in John Carter. Based on a character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also brought us Tarzan, with writer/director Andrew Stanton riding high as a Hollywood power player after the success of his animated movies Finding Nemo and Wall-E, all it needed was astonishing special effects, which is pretty much a given these days in hi-tech Hollywood, and a popular star.  Step forward US TV favourite Taylor Kitsch playing the intrepid Carter on a nineteenth century trip to Mars, where he finds not just red dust but monsters galore.

With so much going for it, the movie should, on paper, have been a shoe-in for success. Unfortunately that success was absolutely not assured on the paper on which the screenplay was written.

Once again a vastly expensive movie fails because, in part at least, the ingredient which should be the cheapest in the whole blancmange, the screenplay, wasn’t good enough.

Once denigrated as “schmucks with Underwoods”, screenwriters have never been the most visible stars in the Hollywood firmament, although the best are extremely well paid these days as they sit at their computer screens with their dedicated screenwriting programmes.

But the rules still apply. If they don’t get the screenplay right and make a blueprint for the telling of an interesting story with believable characters and clever dialogue, no amount of money, beautiful stars, stunning special effects, brilliant cameramen or visionary directors will make the beast work.

Everyone in Hollywood knows this, yet, somehow, a lot of people continually manage to forget it, sometimes even the writer himself when, like Andrew Stanton, he also happens to be the director. How else do we explain Heaven’s Gate which was written and directed by Michael Cimino?

Having tasted financial and critical success with The Deer Hunter, Cimino set out in 1979 to make a modest $7.5 million Western starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. Two years and around $45 million later he presented an unshowable five hours long movie to United Artists, the studio that had backed him.

In his book about the film, Final Cut, former United Artists executive Steven Bach explained how Cimino, who had once been a commercials director, fell in love with the sumptuous images he was shooting rather than the story he was telling. The result was, Bach says, that the “viewer became a victim sensory overload”.

But why did United Artists let Cimino keep on shooting when they could see the budget was out of control? Basically, because of some very fancy Hollywood-style contracts that protected Cimino, and, perhaps more importantly, because they couldn’t afford not to finish the movie.

There’s little as worthless as an unfinished film, and sometimes it seems, or at least it seemed to them, that the only solution is to keep throwing money at it in the desperate hope that something magical will finally emerge.

It didn’t. Heaven’s Gate sank at the box office, and, less than a month later, United Artists had to be sold to MGM. Cimino’s ambition had been too great. He could never bring himself to stop shooting.

Other movies (actually, lots of them) should perhaps never have started. Take Gigli, a tasteless comedy about a Mafia hit man (Ben Affleck), who is assigned to kidnap a mentally retarded brother of a California district attorney, and assisted by a presumed-to-be lesbian assassin played by Jennifer Lopez (she of the bottom before Pippa).

Worried about the unfunny scenes they were seeing in rushes, the studio executives apparently kept demanding script changes throughout shooting. It didn’t help.  The movie was withdrawn from the cinemas after a three week run, a big chunk of the $54 million budget never recouped, and Affleck and Lopez ended their engagement. Who says there are no sad endings in Hollywood?

The Hollywood habit of engaging one screenwriter after another (and many are never credited) to work on a project, while sometimes successful (as was the case with Gladiator, on which British writer William Nicholson made an important difference), can also indicate that something was wrong with the idea of the movie right from the beginning.

This may or may not have been the case with Battlefield Earth which starred John Travolta in an adaptation of the book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and involved at least two writers. One American critic was unimpressed by their efforts. “A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth,” he wrote of the screenplay which cost $42 million and recouped $22 million.

On Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, it wasn’t just that too many cooks in the writing room may have spoiled the script, it was also that there was a plethora of producers, twenty being credited in all. Stuck in the sands of Morocco for endless months as the budget edged up to $241 million, one of them, a friend of mine, had to take a year off after shooting to get over her experience.

Of course it’s easy to be amused by the hubris of movie directors, the interference of executives, the overweening vanity and demands of some film stars and the eye-watering losses. But this is all in retrospect. It’s easy to be wise after the event.

If Ishtar had been a hit, no one would have criticised Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty for being too obviously in love with themselves on screen. But it wasn’t and they did. While, on a more modest level, if Swept Away in 2002 had been as successful as director Guy Ritchie’s later efforts, it wouldn’t have mattered that it looked rather like a vanity film for his then wife Madonna.

Now I don’t want to hold out too much hope for the makers of John Carter, they don’t deserve it, but it doesn’t always follow that all movies that do badly in their opening weeks are destined to be complete flops.

Blade Runner opened disappointingly in the US in 1982 – shortly after E.T. smashed all records and captured a different kind of public mood. But foreign sales, TV and video rights, and acclaim as one of the classic films of all time, have followed ever since. Whether that means it’s ever gone into profit, I rather doubt, however. Net profit can be a hazy concept in terms of Hollywood bookkeeping.

Surprisingly one film that, against all expectations, is said to have gone into profit was Cleopatra, the 1963 movie on which Elizabeth Taylor got off with Richard Burton. Dogged throughout by Taylor’s delicate health, with the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz rewriting the screenplay every night to negotiate the vicissitudes of filming, it cost the equivalent of about $300 million in today’s money, but finally broke even in 1973 with sales to TV.

Back to John Carter. Although there were still only eight people in the cinema when the lights went up the other night, Disney isn’t about to go bankrupt because of its losses.  The movies the big studios put their hundreds of millions into these days, those aimed at hormone bubbling teenage boys, will still keep coming, and some will get it right.

And how is the best way to get it right? By making sure the screenplay works before filming starts and the hundreds of millions start flooding out.

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Ray Connolly’s black comedy novel Shadows On A Wall, about the making of a movie on which the budget is out of control and the stars and director are found dead, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

Show me the person who has no regrets and I’ll show you either a devil or a saint. But most probably I’ll show you someone with absolutely no imagination. Because having regrets, that ability to look back at our lives and reflect on choices made, actions taken and things said or unsaid, is part of what makes us human.

So when I read yesterday that, according to a survey, most of us spend almost three quarters of an hour a week pondering our missed chances and the wrong roads taken, my first thought was “only three quarters of an hour? What’s everyone doing for the rest of the week?”

We all share these ramblings of the mind, often in the sleepless wee small hours, when we latch on to some incident from decades ago, and then tie ourselves in knots re-evaluating it and wondering what might have happened if we’d done one thing instead of another.

For instance, Sunday was a lovely day in London, and, as I was sitting out in the unexpected sunshine, I remembered another sunny early spring day in 1961 when I’d been a student.

One lunchtime I’d got to talk to a beautiful French girl and when she told me she had nothing to do, I’d skipped lectures and spent an idyllic afternoon climbing the Monument in London with her. I was instantly in love, but, because I didn’t have the nerve to ask her out, I never saw her again. That day is as fresh in my mind as yesterday. And it’s always been a regret that I was so shy.

Then there was my night that never was with Maria Schneider. She was soon to become famous as the young star of the erotic Marlon Brando film Last Tango In Paris, but when I met her, she was just a very pretty French girl with a puppy dog face.

Should I have gone back to that flat with her and the other young actress for the little party they suggested? Obviously not, so it’s not quite a regret, but… Well, a fellow couldn’t help wondering when he saw so much of her in her famous film the following year.

Girls and boys. They’re what make the young world go round. So it isn’t surprising that 20 per cent of us are said to have regrets about our romances, which is clearly reflected in the high incidence of divorce. But family life can cause just as much, if not a great deal more, real heart searching.

When my children were small I was loaned a movie camera to take on holiday to Portugal, and, because I didn’t really know how to operate it, and was very busy when I got home, I never got around to having the film processed.

The reels have since been lost, meaning that although I have thousands of still photographs of the children, there are no home movies of them showing the way they were that summer, learning to swim and playing games on the beach. I’m sure the film wouldn’t have been very good, but it would have existed. It was my own stupid fault and nothing I can do will put it right. That’s a real regret.

As is the fact that although I spent years armed with a tape recorder interviewing very famous people, it never occurred to me to record my own mother’s voice. I don’t know why I didn’t. I just took her for granted. And now it’s too late.

When I was making my career she was, like all mothers, very proud of me, but, again, I was always busy, not realising that she would perhaps have liked to have spent more time with me…perhaps just with me alone.

When she got very old she lived alone on the South Coast, a two and a half hour drive away. I went to see her, obviously. But not as often as I could have done and wish I had done. She was lonely. I let her down. That’s my biggest regret.

But there are small regrets, too, that I can’t undo. I used to bump into an old and good friend from university from time to time when we would always plan to get together for a night out to reminisce. Then one day I got a phone call from his widow. He’d died unexpectedly from a heart attack.

Like many people of my generation I’ve had an incredibly lucky life. I don’t regret, as apparently many do, not working harder at school. I did just enough to get to university where I did just enough to get a degree, which always seemed to me to be the right balance. But it’s been a lifetime sadness that I never took the time to learn the guitar and play in a band – any band. That being said I could easily have started guitar lessons later in life but somehow never bothered, so whose fault is that?

When I finally realised I wasn’t as good a runner as I used be, I began to wish I’d taken part in at least one marathon, just to test myself. But, again, how honest am I being?  I’d had years to do it and could never be bothered to even start training.

I’ve always been hopeless with money, too, never paying enough attention, if you want to know, because the work I do always seemed so much more interesting. So I suppose I’m not as well off as I could have been, something, which, in the darkest hours can chide me. But that’s probably me just being greedy. Most people, I would imagine, would think I’ve done all right.

Like everybody, I’ve made some unwise career choices, though they didn’t seem foolish at the time. But then, isn’t that the problem with regretting anything. Only in retrospect can we see the mistakes we think we made and imagine the road not travelled. And even then how honest are we really being with ourselves?

For instance, let’s return to the French girl I took up the Monument. What if I had asked her out and she’d turned me down, as I probably thought she might? That would have been a dagger in my heart for ever.

Alternatively, what if she’d said “yes”, and we’d gone out together, and on better acquaintance I’d discovered that she wasn’t quite as perfect as I’d imagined. The result would have been that I’d have forgotten her, as I’ve forgotten other girls, and I’d have missed the bittersweet daydream of never knowing. And believe me I have enjoyed that daydream.

In the film It’s A Wonderful Life the James Stewart character is driven to the brink of suicide, thinking that all the life choices he made were a mistake. Then up pops his guardian angel, Clarence, to save his life and show him how things would have been if he’d never existed, and how all kinds of little decisions he’d made helped make his world a better place. Maybe we all need a guardian angel to point this out to us sometimes.

It’s often said that you don’t regret what you’ve done, only what you haven’t done. There’s much truth in this. But we have to be careful with some of those night-time self-reproaches, the ones that point to the other gloriously successful lives we might have had. Because, in truth, they’re often just pipe dreams that vanish with the morning.

We only ever know for certain the consequences of what we did. And although we like to paint for ourselves the rosiest of pictures of the road not travelled, we can never be sure. It might have led to disaster. And basically we did what we did because we are who we are, for good and bad.

Not that we don’t wonder. But that’s because we’re human.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadows-On-A-Wall-ebook/dp/B006XXX0IW/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_1

We had no idea when we clambered into Lathom Hall as fourteen year old schoolboys that we were trespassing in what was left of one of the “finest Palladian houses in the country”, as Catherine Ostler informed us in the Daily Mail last week.

We also didn’t know that the last Earl of Lathom had been a hopeless hedonist who held dodgy parties there, orgies, I suspect, where guests dressed up as babies and were wheeled about in prams. We wouldn’t have understood if we had known…and, to be honest, it still seems a pretty odd thing to do to me. And we had no idea that he’d had to sell the entire estate in 1925 to pay off his vast debts.

The only thing my friend John Rimmer and I knew when we cycled up the long drive to what remained of this grand country house in 1955 was that it represented a local Lancashire mystery that just had to be explored.

For two boys growing up in rural West Lancashire, the very name Lathom Hall was heavy with romance. This was where the Countess of Derby and her family had been besieged by Roundhead soldiers during the English Civil War in 1644, after which the original Lathom House, more of a castle really, had been torn down, stone by stone.

The house we crept into had been built on the same site in great Arcadian style eighty years later. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, the main building, along with the vast landscaped garden, a Gothic dairy and hunting lodge, had, once again, been flattened. Two large wings, however, still faced one another. One was already derelict and being used for storing farm equipment, but the other was probably in much the same state as when left by the money squandering earl.

I don’t remember how we got in. We wouldn’t have broken a window or anything, we weren’t delinquents, but somehow we found a way, possibly through the cellars. Then we nervously began to creep around this once elegant palace, with its high ceilings and elaborate cornices, each room leading on to the next.

It was the staircases that excited us most as we made our way, scared stiff, up the building through dusty, echoing bedrooms and on up through the attics to a little tower with a domed roof, that stood symmetrically identical to another on the facing wing.

And that was where we found our “treasure”, a couple of large, ornate copper fingers, bent and  twisted and lying in rubble, presumably all that was left of what had been a clock tower.

Technically, I suppose, we were stealing, but we didn’t think of that as we took the fingers home, polished them until they shone, and then put them in the museum I had in a room next to my bedroom.

This was how John and I spent our school holidays, one craze following another, as, the following year, we went digging for Roman coins in the banks of a stream not far from Lathom Hall.

There, knee deep in water, we’d spend days like gold prospectors, digging out the soil and silt before sieving it through a riddle all the time looking for the small, dull grey discs we knew to be denarii. Over several holidays, one freezing in the snow, we were rewarded with a haul of over thirty coins before we lost interest in that particular pursuit and took up caving.

We didn’t tell our parents much about that particular escapade, but, knowing that a network of tunnels had been dug in the sandstone rock a few miles away, we set out to explore. Attempts had been made over the years to block the entrance to the caves but by sliding on our stomachs into a crevice between the rocks we managed to get inside, and, with torches, scramble off into the pitch blackness.

I’d die of fear if asked to do that now, or if any of my children had been so foolish, and I was relieved to learn later that the entrance to the tunnels had been concreted over. But we were fifteen. It was exciting, more exciting than the chicken farm we attempted on another holiday, where most of the chickens died, or the mushroom business we tried which would probably have poisoned us had it worked.

I’m not one of those people who think that today’s teenagers are missing out on excitement, in that their lives are stuffed with computers and electronic toys, rather than the self generated adventures of my youth. John and I grew up in totally different times and circumstances, when there were an awful lot of bleak, rainy days, too, when we just didn’t know what to do. Teenagers will, in every age, find useful and exciting ways to spend their holidays if they want to.

I’m just grateful to have been young when two boys on bicycles could roam freely, in every sense of the word, through their holidays, following hobby after hobby. Those memories have never left me. In fact that day nervously creeping through the rooms of Lathom Hall turned up, slightly disguised, in a recent novel I wrote called Kill For Love, in which an investigative woman TV reporter breaks into a Palladian mansion, just as John and I did all those years ago.

As they say, memory is the best gallery of all, and jolly useful to a writer.

Footnote: Studying the area on Google Earth it looks to me as though the building John and I broke into is still standing, probably converted into swanky flats or offices now.

Kill For Love is available as an eBook on Amazon

We’ve been watching quite a lot of frantic sex in our house over the past few weeks. It happens every year at this time, when BAFTA, the film and TV society for professionals, begin counting the votes for their annual awards ceremony in February, and DVDs of the latest movies are delivered to the homes of its 6,500 voting members.

In this way, along with the usual adventures of spies, detectives, criminals, pirates, vampires, wizards and quirky talking toys, the modern way of sex reaches us.

Or does it? Somehow I doubt it. I mean, if everyone in the country was having sex the way it’s portrayed in most of the movies we’ve been watching recently, it would suggest we’re living in a nation of super-athletes. And a look at any bus queue tells us we’re not.

There was a time when Hollywood bedroom scenes demanded that one foot stay on the floor at all times. As that was plainly impossible for anyone but a couple of contortionists, it was, of course, never tried, and, as was the intention, there was no sex on screen.

Then we got to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic type of comedies where young, attractive, married couples in pyjamas would climb into single beds alongside each other, and, after a couple lines of more or less snappy dialogue, put out the bedside light and go to sleep. If anything, that was even more unlikely.

But was it any more foolish than the way movie sex is now so frequently portrayed, where the actors seem to have been given the direction “bonk as though your life depended on it, as athletically as you can and we’ll add all kinds of exaggerated sounds to make it even more exciting”.

Were these the instructions given to Daniel Craig before he and that Girl With The Dragon Tattoo went at it with such gusto, or to Michael Fassbender before he pretended to do similar things with all manner of people, and in all kinds of manic ways, in Shame?

Admittedly Fassbender was playing a sex addict, so I suppose some over-diligence might be expected in his case. But the bed crashing, the pulsating gasps, the sound effects magnified off the register, and the naked prostitute being addressed against a plate glass window half way up a glass tower block…?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a lot of tower block windows in my life, but I’ve never seen that. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t care. And when you don’t believe or care in a movie it isn’t working for you.

For the same reason I didn’t believe last year’s champion in the over-athletic bonking stakes either. That was Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right – but it didn’t seem right at all. On the contrary, it was absurd that her character, a lesbian, would suddenly get such a hetero rush for Mark Ruffalo that she went into what looked like frenzied, comic mortal combat with the guy.

I suppose the thinking behind such exaggerated displays of passion is, taking a lead from the porn industry, the more torrid the scene, the more we see and hear, the more entertained we’ll be.

But is that really the case? It seems to me that for sex scenes to really work as the film makers intend, the viewer has to identify with the characters and the emotions being depicted on the screen. Like porn, sex as a spectator sport can quickly become boring.

Despite the legend, it was tedious in the first of the much over-hyped Hollywood bonkathons, Don’t Look Now, which showed Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at it like over intimate wrestlers. Poetic? I don’t think so. That was in the Seventies, and it was downright ridiculous by the Nineties when Jeremy Irons acted out his trysts with Juliette Binoche in Damage.

I know Irons was playing the part of an MP, so, I suppose, all things are possible, but the scenes of him banging the lady’s head on the floor in mid-passion were neither romantic, nor erotic. People in the cinema I attended laughed out loud. I wondered whether the movie should have been retitled Brain Damage.

Obviously viewers like to see attractive people without their clothes, be it in films, advertisements in magazines or on canvas framed on the walls of art galleries. That’s just the way we humans are. But by turning sex on screen into a display of strength, energy, physical suppleness with off the board sound effects added it seems to me the entire point is being lost.

Which brings me to an example of where, if we are to have depictions of a sexual nature on screen, and why not, it works rather better: Birdsong, the BBC’s two part adaptation of love, infidelity and the First World War.

Yes, there’s a lot of rolling around between glistening, starched white sheets, and the odd peeps at the unembarrassed breasts of a beautiful French actress called Clémence Poésy, but there are no gymnastics.

There doesn’t have to be. Having watched an hour of the soon-to-be lovers catching each others’ eyes and touching ankles, we are as much in love with the idea of them being in love, or, at least, in an enhanced state of mutual lust, as the characters are themselves. That’s how it is, or was, some of us will remember – or at least, that’s how we wished it had been.

In other words we, the audience, are not just uninvolved voyeurs of the passion, but feel we are the characters themselves. Now I know at my time of life, or indeed at any time of my life, I never looked much like Eddie Redmayne, but on Sunday night it was me that Clémence Poésy was looking at with those extraordinary eyes. And I’m pretty sure there were a few million married ladies around the country, who were thinking what she seemed to be thinking, as she gazed at young Eddie. That’s the magic of passion on the screen when it’s done right.

Obviously this filmic strand of Birdsong is just upmarket, literary Mills &Boon really, pretty people, gorgeous French setting, hot summer, stolen moments, impossible desire, all those clothes to take off, etc.. But at heart I bet most viewers (with the possible exception of hormone booming teenage boys with their Inbetweeners comic smut) are a lot closer to Mills & Boon in their romantic fantasies than to Hollywood’s utilitarian bonkathons.

And as someone who sees an awful lot of athleticism masquerading as desire on screen whenever the BAFTAS come around, it’s a rather welcome relief.

Ray Connolly’s novel about the making of a Hollywood movie, Shadows On A Wall, has just been republished as an eBook for Kindle.

Professional footballers up and down the country did what they are paid to do over the weekend.  They tried to score goals, and when some of them succeeded their various team mates rushed to engulf them in euphoric tangles of arms, legs and kisses.

Why such passion? They play twice a week. A goal isn’t that rare a phenomenon.

But then nor are prizes in acting for Kate Winslet who whinnied and hyperventilated in apparent astonishment when a couple of months ago she won yet another. Knowing that she’s brilliant, she must surely have stopped being surprised at her own success years ago. Everybody else did.

And why do we see the regular academic weep-athon when sixth form girls fall upon each other’s necks to sob with joy when they read their A-level results every August?

I’ll tell you why. We are all beginning to behave in the way we think we’re expected to behave. That is to say, the footballers, Kate and the sixth formers are over-reacting by way of tears, gasps and over-dramatic celebrations because that’s how they’ve seen characters over-react for years in melodramatically directed television soap operas.

“Life doesn’t imitate art,” Woody Allen declared some years ago, “it imitates bad television.” And that was in the days when bad television, at least in this country, was nowhere near as vapid as it is now.

So, welcome to our Phony World.

I’m not talking here about the way some of us make ourselves look – fake tans, fake bosoms, fake hair colour, fake teeth. Mankind has always tried to pretty or sexy itself up, whether it be by wearing cod pieces, make-up or bustles. That’s all part of the mating and status raising process. No. What I find odd is that absurd displays of cheesy exaggeration on television have been so absorbed by viewers they are now copied and considered normal behaviour.

They aren’t. There’s nothing normal about the ludicrous scowls of Alan Sugar in The Apprentice. What he presents is a laughable bogeyman in staged scenes of pretend tension. Yet you can be sure that little management Napoleons up and down the country are aping Sugar’s glares and rudeness in offices this very day.

Similarly the pantomime indignation of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight as he tries to get a politician to answer an impossibly complex question with a single word, “Yes or No”, isn’t real vexation. He’s just playing a part – that of the entertainer interrogator.

It’s cod exasperation and he does it very well, considerably better than all those copycat bullies who no doubt use similar eye-popping smirks in schools, colleges, police stations, courts and offices everywhere, in risible attempts to display their interrogatory skills.

Nothing, of course, is remotely as counterfeit as that found in the virus of reality pop music shows with which Simon Cowell has infected television. Here contestants are encouraged to break down as though their entire families are about to be wiped out at any moment, when actually the very worst that can happen is a quick elimination from the next round; while in front of them judges over-act bullying, falling out, surprise and wet-eyed empathy as they parrot lines of crass banality. “Tonight, you own that song!” they lie, as television manipulation and phoniness reaches its nadir.

And from such flim-flam fakery, and similar less insidious earlier shows, it’s but a small leap before the sobbing virus finds the tear ducts of the young and impressionable. Hence the squealing and sobbing when exam results come through, with older teachers almost certainly thinking: “What’s all the fuss about? I didn’t go into meltdown when I got my results”.

But that would have been before a couple of generations had been born, nurtured and finally brainwashed by camera phones, unreal reality TV, pop videos, online profiles and all things visual. It wouldn’t surprise me if many young people of today feel they are almost living in their own TV programme.

Actually some of them are. On YouTube and our mobile phones we find elaborately rehearsed and stage managed weddings, marriage proposals and all manner of other, usually private, performances. Everywhere we look we find ordinary people acting out parts – perhaps none more so, perhaps, than the Rambo lookalikes of the Libyan civil war.

The movie The Truman Show, in which a boy/young man spends his days unaware that he’s living in a fake world specially constructed so that TV cameras can follow his every move, carried this to a satirical extreme. But then came Big Brother, where participants begin acting up for the cameras by copying the overstated behaviour of soap characters?

With celebrity now an ambition in itself, almost everyone wants to be a star. But sometimes the magnet of instant celebrity is not so warming. Were all those pious pilgrimages to Amy Winehouse’s home by fans carrying roses wrapped in Cellophane really displays of deep and genuine grief? Or were some of those people just turning up because they quite liked her singing, she was famous and local, there were TV cameramen there, and the laying of flowers at a scene of tragedy is what happens on the telly?

In such ways loss for one family may be transmuted into momentary fame for another, as shots of the apparent mourners get their ten seconds on the TV news.

Ah yes, the television news. Obviously by the very nature of their job newsreaders have to frequently announce pretty upsetting events. But does Fiona Bruce have to emote quite so much? She’s sitting there as a messenger, not an actress.

Happily it’s become increasingly rare to hear music used as an accompaniment to news items. But what about those documentaries where it’s poured on to the soundtrack like gravy to heighten tension or stir sympathies…thus turning investigation into entertainment.

Not that phoniness is dispersed only through television. It’s all around us, with party political conferences excusing it as “presentation”.

Closer to home, there’s the false intimacy by which call centre employees so quickly wish to address us when they want to sell us something – overlooking the fact that we are total strangers to them. “Do you mind if I call you John?” they ask cosily. It seems priggish not to let them, even though only they and the tax man know me by that name.

Then there’s the internet where the average Facebook member has, apparently, 130 online “friends”, although he or she will never have met most of them, and couldn’t care less if someone called Dilly in San Diego has lost her cat and wonders if any of her “friends” has seen it!

Often the spurious friendship comes by email. While I’ve been writing this article I’ve had a message saying “We miss you…” from a company selling men’s toiletries, an organisation from which I’ve never bought anything. How can they miss someone they’ve never known?

It’s good to have pals and to know they “sort of” mean it when they say they’ve missed you. But everything else is bogus – not unlike the explosions of laughter which follow the weakest of jokes in those doleful Radio 4 comedy shows.

Not much on Radio 4 is very funny since Linda Smith died. But if you didn’t understand English and could only measure how amusing a line was by the decibels of appreciation that follow its delivery, you might reasonably assume that Radio 4 transmits the utterings of the funniest people in the world.

It doesn’t. Studio audiences are generous with their hearty guffaws because they understand that the very reason they are there is to laugh. But the level of their good humour, as picked up by those strategically placed microphones, invariably sounds exaggerated when heard on our radios. It’s a cheat.

You could argue that since the evolution of our species we’ve always been guilty of duplicity in our dealings with each other, and that the much admired British stiff upper lip was just as phoney in its way as any of the emotional conflagrations on The Only Way Is Essex.

But I don’t think so. British understatement and stoicism were cultural characteristics which took generations and hundreds of years to develop and be passed on. Tat television and the internet is changing us within a few decades.

There was a fashionable phrase some years ago that went “you are what you eat”. Now we’re in danger of becoming what we watch – a nation full of insincere phonies acting like the wallies on the wretched X-Factor.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ray-Connolly-Beatles-Archive-ebook/dp/B0052AFE6S/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_t_1

“John…” says Sir George Martin measuring his words, “hated his voice. When we were recording he was always asking me to distort and disguise it by putting different sorts of echo on it. In that way when he heard it through his headphones in the studio he could forget that he was listening to John Lennon. I loved his voice.”

So, of course, did hundreds of millions of others who never suspected Lennon’s insecurities. But, for seven years in the Sixties, Martin, the serene, elegantly spoken man who produced every Beatles record, observed in close-up all the little worries and ego clashes of the most famous four people in the world.

It’s sometimes been said that Martin, now 85, was the “fifth Beatle”, in that, as well as helping arrange the group’s recordings, he played on at least thirty five of them. I believe he was more important than that. It seems to me that had the Beatles never met George Martin, they would still have become a great rock and roll band with some terrific songs. But with him, a classically trained musician with an ear for adventure, they became a cultural phenomenon that changed the course of popular music.

To think of Martin solely as the Beatles’ producer as many do, is, however, to overlook four fifths of a remarkable career. Did you know, for instance, that as a young man in 1951 he produced what is probably the most familiar piece of music in the UK, when he recorded the theme music for The Archers? By my reckoning that jaunty little jig (officially titled Barwick Green) has been played getting on for 60,000 times since then.

And it’s pretty certain that if he hadn’t recorded Gerry Marsden singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, that song would not have become the great football anthem which is now sung on the terraces not only at Liverpool Football Club but also at Celtic, as well as clubs in Holland, Germany and Japan.

Before that he’d recorded the evergreen children’s favourite Nelly The Elephant, comedy by way of Goodness Gracious Me from Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, and Right, Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins. And then there was the London Philharmonic, jazz virtuosi, tunes for Scottish country dancing, piano recitals, choral pieces, the London Baroque Ensemble and much else that was to prove invaluable when he came across the kaleidoscopic song writing talents of Lennon and McCartney. Tens of thousands of records, all of which explains why on Easter Monday BBC 2’s Arena is devoting a ninety minute film to his life and work.

But how did this extraordinarily varied career begin? Well, not in an educated, musical, upper-middle class home as Martin’s carefully enunciated speaking voice might suggest, and as the Beatles first imagined.

“We were very, very poor when I was a child, living in a flat in Holloway, north London, a run-down four storey house with a family on each floor,” he remembers as we talk at his elegant Georgian country house in Oxfordshire. “My father was a machine carpenter, and was out of work for nearly two years in the Thirties. My mother had to scrub floors to keep the money going. The Depression blighted their lives.”

By sheer chance, however, since neither of his parents could play, they always had a piano. “My uncle was a piano tuner, and he started a company with a friend making pianos. Unfortunately they went broke, but as they had a number of pianos lying around we managed to get one.

“I can remember reaching up to the keys trying to play when I was very small. I only ever had eight piano lessons when I was about ten. Then my mother had a row with the teacher. I’m completely self-taught, because I was playing before I got those lessons. I can’t remember not playing. I can’t really explain it, but I was born with an understanding of music and perfect pitch.

“Paul McCartney can’t read or write music but he’s probably the best musician I know, because he has this innate sense of what music is about and the way that it’s structured. I had that, too. I suppose that was why Paul and I related so well.”

When World War II began the family moved out of London to Bromley in Kent. It was there that he heard his first full orchestra when Sir Adrian Boult brought the BBC Symphony Orchestra to his school for a public performance. Captivated, he began dreaming of becoming the second Rachmaninov, and at 16 went to a private recording studio to record a piece he’d composed.

“Looking back it was nothing amazing, a bit florid and Debussy-like by a very pompous little 16 year old git. At the end of the recording I said ‘You have just heard Fantasy by George Martin’, but when they played the recording back to me what I heard was ‘Fain’asy by George Mar’in’,” and he exaggerates a working class, glottal stop London accent. “I thought, ‘Christ, do I really sound like that!’.” From then on, he consciously began to change his accent. To be a composer he would “have to speak like a BBC person”.

University was financially “out of range completely”, and leaving school at 16, with his parents’ anxious advice to “get a safe job…in the Civil Service”, he did that for a year before volunteering for the Fleet Air Army, much to the distress of his mother who was sure he would get himself killed.

As it happened he never saw any action (“we dropped a few depth charges on what we thought was a submarine, but it might well have been a whale”), but got a lucky break when he went to hear a concert by a fairly well known pianist of the time provided by the Royal Navy.

“I missed my piano when I was in the Navy, so after the pianist had finished and the hall emptied I went up to the piano to play to myself. What I didn’t know was that he was still there, heard me, and asked what I was playing, which was one of my own pieces. He then told me I should send it to a chap called Sidney Harrison at the Committee for the Promotion of New Music.”

The result was a sort of pen-pal relationship with Harrison, sending him everything he composed and getting back pages of stern criticism. And when in 1947, now an officer and speaking like one, he was offered a twelve year commission in the Royal Navy it was Harrison who insisted that he should become a musician. He was good at it.

“I didn’t see how I could. I was 21 and had no musical education to speak of. But he arranged for me to meet the principal at the Guildhall School of Music, where, as an ex-serviceman, I was paid for three years to learn composition, orchestrating and conducting and a second instrument, the oboe.”

He could play enough to earn “a kind of a living”, but knew he would never be good enough to be a performer, when, aged 24 he was invited to a meeting at EMI Records. His influential pen-pal Sidney Harrison had recommended him once again.

“I didn’t know what EMI was, but I put on my naval great coat and got on my bike and cycled over to Abbey Road studios…”, where he was promptly made assistant to the head of Parlophone Records on a salary of  seven pounds, four shillings and threepence a week.

Thrown in at the deep end it was a steep learning curve doing every kind of music with the smallest of EMI’s labels. “Jimmy Shand’s Scottish country dance records were our biggest sellers then, but I thought there might be a market in comedy. I loved the Goon Show and recorded Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine. Then there was Rolf Harris, Peter Ustinov (“an expert on baroque music, by the way”) and Flanders and Swann. He produced pop hits, too, most memorably Matt Monro’s Softly As I Leave You and trad jazz with Humphrey Lyttelton’s Bad Penny Blues, which would later become a starting point for the Beatles’ Lady Madonna.

But then he seemed to get it wrong, when, in the late Fifties and now head of Parlophone, rock and roll arrived. Columbia Records, one of EMI’s much bigger labels had Cliff Richard, and the pressure was on for Parlophone to have a rock star of its own. “I knew something about pop music, but rock and roll….I mean it was there, but it was alien to me. I was never a great Elvis Presley fan, so maybe that was a black mark against me because everybody else was…” including Judy, his second wife of 45 years. “I was always looking for a rock and roll act, but…”

Then in 1962 Brian Epstein turned to him in desperation, having seen his group, the Beatles, rejected by every other recording company in Britain.

“When Brian played me their demo tape I told him that if he wanted me to sign a group based on what I was hearing the answer was ‘no’. But he looked so crestfallen I told him to bring the group down from Liverpool and I’d give them an hour in the studio to see what I could find. That was it. I didn’t fall head over heels.”

But then he met them. “We liked each other. They were charismatic. I thought if they could charm the pants off me they could charm the pants off an audience. And if I could find them a hit song I’d have a hit group. They didn’t have a song themselves.” Love Me Do, he still thinks, wasn’t much more than a riff.

Desperate not to let this opportunity pass the Beatles agreed to record a song Martin had been sent called How Do You Do It? (Later a number one for Gerry and the Pacemakers.) They did a workmanlike job, “but John begged me not to release it. They wanted to write their own songs. When they’d first played me Please Please Me it was really dreary, but they went away and speeded it up, and we worked on it and put a harmonica on the beginning and it was great. I think I said at the time ‘You’ve got your first number one’.”

Did he know that later some American disc jockeys wouldn’t play it because they thought it was about mutual heavy petting? He laughs. “No. We were so innocent then.” He pauses, then smiles. “But it’s quite probable it crossed the boys’ minds.”

“The boys…” That’s how he still fondly refers to them, as a schoolmaster might about special pupils. Just how special they were he was soon to discover. “They were eternally curious. They so much wanted to learn, and Abbey Road studios (with its band room full of old, forgotten instruments) was like a fantastic toy shop for them.”

But there was something else. Although he won’t admit it, I believe that more influential than the Abbey Road “toy shop” was Martin’s vast musical knowledge which the Beatles also raided. They knew everything about rock and roll and not much else. He didn’t know much about rock, but he did know a vast amount about other kind of music.

When Paul McCartney (“he always had very good ideas”) brought in Yesterday, it was Martin who scored it for a string quartet, and later when the same writer came up with Eleanor Rigby Martin dug into his knowledge of film music, and, as “it was a very spiky piece”, borrowed from Bernard Hermann’s orchestration for Hitchcock’s Psycho. While for Lennon he wrote and played the electric piano break which sounds like a harpsichord on In My Life, made a Hammond organ sound like a fairground on For The Benefit of Mr Kite.

Was he aware of Lennon’s envy of McCartney’s gift for melody?

He sidesteps the question. “There was a competitive element between them, and if John was envious of Paul’s musicianship, Paul was envious of John’s facility with words. John’s musicianship wasn’t as deep as Paul’s but he had an uncanny knack of finding the right musical vehicle for his lyrics. For instance, Imagine (which Martin didn’t produce) is a simple song based on just a couple of chords. Only John could have written that. Paul couldn’t. Both were incredibly talented people, and scoring points off each other and envying each other, proved to be a ladder that they climbed together.”

Shortly after the Beatles broke up John Lennon said to me, “Paul and me were the Beatles. We wrote the songs.” Was that fair?

“It’s not far off really. They got rid of one drummer in Pete Best and Ringo became the luckiest drummer in the world. How many people would get the opportunity to become an integral part of the Beatles? If they’d changed their lead guitarist, too, and engaged another they would still have been the Beatles because John and Paul would have gone on writing those songs which made them so successful.

“Ringo became a rock solid part of the band and George developed. His early songs were derivative and rubbish. He wasn’t part of the Lennon and McCartney song writing team and he found that frustrating. He would have loved to have had a collaborator but he didn’t and had to work by himself.

“I didn’t encourage him enough, which I regret because I should have done, but I was rather occupied with two other people. Eventually he came up with Here Comes the Sun, which was a great song, and one of the best love songs ever in Something. It makes Paul wince when I say that, because that was Paul’s domain.

“But they were a band and they would work out ideas between them. George was always good for a guitar lick, and Paul, too, sometimes. John would sing his songs to me on his acoustic guitar and then I’d go over to the piano and play what I thought it was, and then we’d decide how we were going to do it.  They’d all put their oar in with ideas. John had immense faith in Ringo’s taste. If he was singing and playing something he’d ask Ringo what he thought. If Ringo said ‘It’s crap, John,’ he’d just drop it and go on to something else.” He pauses. “I don’t think Ringo was quite so honest or vocal with Paul.”

It’s been said that Paul never knew what his best songs were when he’d written them, I suggest.

“He still doesn’t,” comes the reply. “You can’t expect a genius to have the same critical faculties as someone who isn’t a genius, can you? Yes, I think he’s a genius. I’m happy to go into print on that. John, too. When you look back at their work…it’s incredible.”

His loyalty is touching, because his “boys” weren’t always loyal to him. With the Beatles’ success the balance of power in the studio shifted. “When in 1969 they recorded the Let It Be album John said bluntly ‘We want this to be an honest album, George, so I don’t want any of your crap on it’” (referring to the overdubbing of additional instruments and arrangements that had made Sergeant Pepper such a tour de force two years earlier).We’ll play and you just sit there and tell us if it’s all right.’

“So they started recording and it never was right. It was a very unhappy time. They’d be up to take 53. In the end he and George (Harrison) took the tapes away and gave them to Phil Spector to edit, who then did all the things John wouldn’t let me do, overdubbing like mad. I was very cross about that.”

Actually he felt betrayed. He never recorded Lennon again after the Beatles broke up. “After John died Yoko said to me that she wished I’d worked with John once more. If he’d asked me I would have jumped at it, but he never asked.”

McCartney did, and there would be several more chart topping collaborations between the two in the Seventies and Eighties, but, due to the caché Martin had acquired through his Beatles work, he was by then in great demand everywhere. “It gave me a freedom to do what I wanted to do.”

That included composing the scores to fifteen movies, including the James Bond film Live And Let Die (McCartney wrote and sang the title song), building two recording studios, one on the island of Montserrat (sadly later destroyed by a hurricane and volcano), and working with the King’s Singers, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Webb, Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers, the John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, the hit group America and dozens of others. Then there was the night he produced the biggest selling single of all time in Elton John’s the reworking of Candle In the Wind after the death of Princess Diana.

He once assumed that after Sergeant Pepper popular music would go on “building into, without sounding too pompous, a new art form. But then along came punk in the Seventies. The Sex Pistols singing God Save The Queen was like people coming in and dropping their trousers and showing their bums. I found that very disappointing. But what we’d done has fed into the bloodstream so it’s still a part of music as it’s metamorphosed into something else. It’s still healthy.”

Less healthy is his hearing, his “nerve endings withered by sitting in front of the studio speakers all those years”. Now one of the patrons of Deafness Research UK, sounds come across as “tinny and Dalek-like” and when five years ago he was asked to mix the music for the Beatles’ Las Vegas show Love he was grateful for the younger ears of his son, Giles, who is also a record producer. “The thing about deafness is that in a social environment it’s very difficult to tell what’s going on and you feel emasculated.”

Not that that stops him composing, having recently finished a 15 minute choral piece based upon his unused score for the film The Mission. “I write from memory because I know what the notes sound like. But, of course, I will never hear the piece properly.”

It seems a terrible irony but he appears to accept it with a smile: George Martin, still the quietly dignified man who helped make the Beatles something more than extraordinary.

Produced By George Martin will be shown on BBC-2 on Easter Monday,  April 25.

Ray Connolly’s new novel about music, The Sandman, is available as an eBook from Amazon.