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It's a great and easy read, giving more insight into Gary Sparrow's character and emotional discomfort than a sitcom allows and is very playful about the fairly dismal early 60s and the attitudes of the people there, juxtaposed with the comparatively incredible lives of the people of 2016 (who are just deciding whether to try to return to the world of the fifties and early sixties in a mistaken belief that things were better then.
Gary is in trouble as the Beatles are about to break and he has been playing their songs as his for a couple of decades, but also Ian Fleming is on his back thinking he might be a spy. What will happen if Gary stops the Beatles getting a record deal to save his own bacon?
Obviously the film Yesterday also wonders what a world without the Beatles would be like - though in that version it's largely the same, just Oasis don't exist and (spoilers) John Lennon is still alive. A neat twist on that might have been the revelation that Paul McCartney is dead (for real this time), but Yesterday doesn't really go into the alternate Universe possibilities of such a monumental shift in history.
If the Beatles had never existed or not made it big then so many things would be different and almost certainly no one under 64 (deliberate choice) would be alive today. A different load of people would exist instead. You may have noticed that I do have a bee in my bonnet about people not realising how much you can change the future just by killing a bee in your bonnet, let alone replacing the song track that the world has sung to for the last six decades.
Marks and Gran are also not going to waste a whole book on the conceit that Gary Sparrow wipes himself from existence by stopping the Beatles getting a record deal and they step away from the brink - still changing enough things to alter the future greatly, but the lovely thing about Goodnight Sweetheart is that in some episodes that happened and in others it didn't. Comedy writers are probably more successful if they concentrate on being funny rather than attempting the impossible task of being pedantically correct about the butterfly effect.
Anyway, one of the rewards for backing the project was to get your name used in the book, though I had to wait to page 231 to find out what they'd done to me. I don't know if I dreamed it or if someone told me, but I thought I was going to be a stage hypnotist skulking in a doorway (I had told Maurice Gran that he could be as mocking of me as possible), but my dream or informant were wrong. I am the proprietor of Richard Herring and daughter (so Phoebe makes it into the book too, though not by name, which is apt as I don't think it's entirely coincidental that Phoebe is one of the main characters in Goodnight Sweetheart), a shop near the British Museum that sells old bank notes
My character, fittingly, has a toothbrush moustache and it's nice to be immortalised in the Goodnight Sweetheart canon. What I once enjoyed with a slice of youthful irony, I now enjoy for real. I hope they will do more of these in book form (and also hoping to be talking to one or both of them about it soon), but am delighted that they have at least done this one. Out of all those pilots of old sitcoms that the BBC made ten years ago I think this one had the most going for it - different enough from the original, but still the same flavour. The added underplayed poignancy of the whole country attempting to go back to the Sixties, whilst Gary slowly goes mad being stuck in that boring, black and white, Beatle-less (for now) world is a lovely touch. More interesting than going from the 90s to the 40s in many ways.
Chuffed to be a part of it. I don’t think we’ll ever see “Goodnight Goodnight Sweetheart Sweetheart” (my take on the idea), but you never know.
