Samira Ahmed is an award-winning journalist and writer, and is perhaps best known for presenting the BBC’s Front Row on Radio 4 and the weekly show, Newswatch. In 2020 she was named British Broadcasting Press Guild's Audio Presenter of the Year.
Beatles fans will also know her from her regular appearances on I Am the Eggpod, a podcast dedicated to all things Fab Four. In 2021 she interviewed Paul McCartney at the South Bank Centre in an event marking the release of his book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. And, in 2023, when a rare recording of the band playing an early gig at Stowe School came to light, Samira was one of the first people to hear it. She subsequently dedicated a special edition of Front Row to a report timed to coincide with the concert’s sixtieth anniversary.
In early April Samira’s book in which she applies her journalistic skill to analysing the Beatle’s film A Hard Day’s Night, will be published by Bloomsbury. Later this month, she will be appearing at The Oxford Literary Festival to discuss what the film reveals about life in Britain.
Samira’s love of the band stems from watching A Hard Day’s Night (and other Beatles films), at the tender age of 11, but what I wanted to know was, what was it about the band that appealed to an 11-year-old Samira?
“I can still remember a sense of discovering this group of young men who were friends – equals. They cocked a snook at authority, and you just felt you wanted to be part of their gang.
The film is documentary style, and portrays them as they are, in the real world. So even though it was black and white and it seemed like another era, I think I had a sense that I just missed out on something very exciting seismic change in Britain”.
How did you go about the research, and what was writing process like?
I knew when I pitched the book that I had a really strong sense of all the ideas that were raging in my head. I'd done an episode of I Am the Egg Pod about the film, and I had all these theories that were based on what it revealed about Britain at the time. It's about using critical thinking – skills I learned at Oxford University – to analyse a piece of art. What's going on in this piece? What can we see?
I absolutely love 60s cinema. I'd watched the film several times and made notes going through it, and I'd read and watched loads of interviews. In terms of the writing process, I realised the art to it was just to write the bits that jumped out at me. So the first section I wrote was the chapter on all the women in this film; analysing what they reveal about social change, about women's careers – it was much more than the screaming.
I wrote that first, and then I knew I wanted to write a chapter about television industry. The whole premise of the film is they come to London to make a live TV show. This was revealing about TV, and about this moment in Britain when high and low culture was starting to mix. It captures all that, and Richard Lester [the film’s director] said the film is full of jokes based on his experiences of things going wrong during a live TV show.
[Next], there was the legacy of the film. George Harrison went on to found Handmade Films and making some of the most quirky British films of the 80s: the anti-Merchant Ivory. He made Withnail and I, and Mona Lisa; cult films. Also, The Monkees and all the other bands that tried to replicate the spirit of A Hard Day’s Night. And the pop video itself; Richard Lester was famously given an NTB Vanguard Award in 1984 for inventing the pop video with A Hard Day's Night.
The actual writing process was delightful. I wrote listening to jazz music rather than Beatles music – Richard Lester is a huge jazz fan, and it was the perfect soundtrack, lots of Dave Brubeck and Sally Rollins. I must also say that everything in the book has been rigorously fact-checked by Mark Lewis who is the world's greatest Beatles historian. I'm confident that the book will stand the stern scrutiny of the most ardent and knowledgeable Beatles fan.
Which elements of the book are you planning to focus on in your talk at the Oxford Literary Festival?
My big interest is in these films as a social document: what they reveal about how The Beatles changed Britain and changed us. Ted Heath had said a few months earlier that he didn't understand the way [The Beatles] spoke, and John Lennon was asked about it in an interview. He said, ‘Well, we're not going to vote for Ted’, looked at the camera and gave it a hard stare. A few months later, The Beatles won at the Variety Awards, and the Labour Prime Ministerial candidate, Harold Wilson, was very pleased to be giving them the trophies – like he's tying himself in with the new generation.
I want to bring out some of the quirky stories. Like, the cinematographer was an RAF cameraman who had shot aerial footage for Churchill of the bombing raids over Germany, and there are all these scenes where you realise the Beatles are running around like they were on a war mission. I'm going to put together some of these elements that I don't think anyone's really put together in this way before. And it’s why the film works. It's a coming together of a remarkable group. A director with vision, a cinematographer with vision, and a great script. Paul McCartney and John Lennon watched a lot of comedy, and they knew what they wanted. They were very savvy about the comedy culture and slapstick.
The Introduction of my book places the Beatles in a Britain that was taking in a new generation of immigrants, and it was actually immigrants (Americans and Canadians) who made A Hard Day’s Night. There is something they represent which is about an identity and is inclusive. They celebrated Black musicians, and George Harrison went on to promote Indian culture. At a time when there’s a lot of dangerous ideas swirling around about what it means what it means to be British, it’s a film that celebrates Britishness, made out of all these components of world culture.
Samira, I feel like this is a Bridget Jones question, but did you fancy them?
That's a really good question. Yes, I think I did. Even though they were in black and white, they were all handsome – well, they were smart – and they were intelligent, and there was something very childlike about them. So even at the age of 11, there's a sense of attraction. Then, as I got older, I became pretty obsessed with George Harrison.
Good choice …
My mother was a young mother in the 60s and her favourite was Ringo [perhaps because] he seemed more accessible. My paternal grandmother, who came from Pakistan and used to come and stay for periods, her favourite was Paul.
There's an idea that all four Beatles represent different aspects of a single personality. There is also this idea of a kind of astrology – you could be a George with Paul rising – and that's one of the things that the film plays with. That's the other thing, the film was the first time that adults really got to tell them apart. All their different quirks come through.
Samira Ahmed will be discussing A Hard Day’s Night at the Oxford University Mathematical Institute on Sunday 29 March at 4pm. For tickets and further information, visit oxfordliteraryfestival.org.
Samira Ahmed’s book, A Hard Day’s Night, will be published in paperback on 2 April and is available for pre-order. It is part of a series of British Film Institute Classics, published by Bloomsbury.
