Diana Wichtel on The Beatles: Get Back a long trip worth the time

The Beatles: Get Back a three-part documentary by Peter Jackson covering the making ot the 1970 album Let It Be.

Some saw potential in George but in 1964 it was Paul or John. I announced with the certainty of 13 that if I got a call saying Paul wanted to marry me — I had something like the annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in mind — I'd pack my bags.

Paul and John: two motherless boys. I was about to be a fatherless girl. One of the last things our family did together was watch The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, February 64. My father pronounced the music dreadful. My mother was somehow offended by the sight of four fresh-faced boys in suits and ties. Before Mum took us kids to New Zealand, my sister acquired Please Please Me, forbidden in the totalitarian state of our house. One day Dad bailed me up to talk as I clutched the banned vinyl behind me before backing nonchalantly into my bedroom. He knew. As our family disintegrated, I holed up in my bedroom with the album: "The world is treating me bad. Mis-ery!"

We queued for tickets to A Hard Day's Night, exquisite, black-and-white hormonal torment. I bonded with our handsome 21-year-old boarder over "she was just 17". I seemed under some sort of curse: we left Vancouver just before The Beatles played there and arrived just after they played Auckland. Misery.

More than 50 years ago today, I sat in Babel coffee bar in Victoria St and heard Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It possibly altered the synaptic plasticity or something of a generation despite featuring cosy cottages on the Isle of Wight and quaint pick-up lines: "When are you free to take some tea with me?"

The White Album: I was just 17, a student, mixed flatting. Our family was in pieces, my father lost. Blackbird on high rotate: "Take these broken wings and learn to fly/ All your life/ You were only waiting for this moment to arise."

Memories are packed into a room full of Beatles and their retinue in Peter Jackson's Get Back. It's suitably epic, made from 60 hours of film generated in 1969 for a TV special to accompany a concert that never happened but became Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1970 film, Let It Be. Now we get Jackson's eight hours of still very young Beatles trying to write an album's worth of songs, exhibiting all the irritation, ennui and lingering affection of an exhausted marriage.

There's the whole legendary concert on the roof of their new Apple headquarters, up in the chilly rarefied air The Beatles by then shared. It catches a 60s' moment, the transgenerational shift of cultural currency not unlike the one we're living through now, as Monty Pythonesque cops try to shut it down. "It woke me from my sleep," says a lady in the street below, "and I don't like it".

It's about creative process: the segment where Paul McCartney, noodling on the guitar, seemingly speaking in tongues, coaxes Get Back out of wherever genius resides. After 95 near misses, when he arrives at the lines, "Jojo left his home in Tucson Arizona / For some California grass," a small cheer erupted in our lounge. Words only waiting for the moment to arise.

Tension simmers: George being ignored, again, when he says, "I've got a few slow ones if you want." But they were such polite young men, their requirements so domestic: toast and tea and cigarettes. George getting a shock from a microphone — "F***ing hell!" — is as wild as it gets.

Enduring mysteries get sorted. None of the four really wanted to perform for an audience. Perhaps there was some post-traumatic stress from the carnal, carnivorous fandom of the live years. Yoko stages an occupation of almost every frame John is in but it's clear the Wags were never really the issue. See small Heather McCartney find a solid role model in the alleged interloper, screaming into a microphone like Auntie Yoko.

Get back to where you once belonged: I'm not sure if it dragged me back to 1969 or them forward to now. The eight hours feel so intimately real — all chords and colours and shiny hair. They inhabit some place where the past isn't left behind but is running alongside, as recorded by a microphone hidden in a flowerpot. Jackson restored more than some film.

"It's very long. Come on," complained Kim Hill, in conversation with Lindsay-Hogg, director of Let It Be in 1970. "So is a flight from Australia to England," said Lindsay-Hogg brightly. In other words, Get Back is a trip worth the mileage.

Next week: Steve Braunias