The Beatles: Get Back review – eight hours of TV so aimless it threatens your sanity

In Peter Jackson’s latest epic, the moments of inspiration and interest are marooned amid acres of meandering chit-chat. What a schlep

The Beatles’ 1970 album Let It Be and its depressing accompanying documentary were always bugbears among the former Fabs. John Lennon dismissed the music as “badly recorded shit”; Paul McCartney was so horrified by the album that he masterminded a new version in 2003, shorn of the additions by Phil Spector, whom Lennon employed as a producer without telling McCartney. None of the Beatles turned up to the documentary’s premiere; Ringo Starr objected that it was “very narrow” and had “no joy”.

Peter Jackson’s Get Back is a documentary series designed to address Starr’s concerns. It shows a broader, ostensibly happier, picture of the band’s doomed 1969 project to write a new album, rehearse the songs and perform them live in the space of two weeks. Whether the Get Back sessions hastened the Beatles’ demise remains moot, but a preponderance of footage featuring songs sung in funny voices, mugging to camera and in-jokes can’t stop the initial sessions at Twickenham Studios from looking like misery.

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PC Andrew Harper’s killing was appalling, but changing the law won’t protect key workers | Zoe Williams

Although Harper’s law sets out to protect emergency service workers, it will do little to change their lived realities

Harper’s law is named after PC Andrew Harper, killed in pursuit of three quad bike thieves in 2019. It introduces mandatory life sentences for anyone whose crimes result in the death of an emergency service worker, and is expected to take effect at the start of 2022, after a successful campaign by Harper’s widow, Lissie. The pair were newlyweds when the police officer was killed.

Some crimes and their subsequent prosecution demand systemic change; others feel simply unresolved by the legal outcome, and it’s hard in the moment to distinguish between the two. Harper’s killers, Henry Long, then aged 18, and Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, both 17, were all cleared of murder and convicted of manslaughter. Their sentences weren’t insignificant – Long’s was 16 years; Cole and Bowers were both sentenced to 13 – but their conduct was unrepentant, chilling. It emerged after the trial that the jurors had been given extra security amid fears of potential intimidation by supporters of the defendants. It was understandable to perceive, as Lissie Harper did, that rather than facing justice, Long, Cole and Bowers had slipped through its technicalities and niceties, that their punishment was insignificant compared with the harm they had caused.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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The Smallest Covid Threats Get Their Shields

By BY JENNIFER STEINHAUER from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3l7mX4E

As Turkeys Take Over Campus, Some Colleges Are More Thankful Than Others

By BY MITCH SMITH from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3l8ceXQ

Spelling Bee Forum

By BY ISAAC ARONOW AND DOUG MENNELLA from NYT Crosswords & Games https://ift.tt/3nO63tx

Rare wild bees find has English country estate buzzing

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Frustrated with CIA, Trump administration turned to Pentagon for shadow war with Iran

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Sweden's prime minister quits just hours after taking the position

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Thursday briefing: Despair and blame after Channel deaths

Macron urges Johnson not to politicise migrant crisis … three white men found guilty of Ahmaud Arbery murder … and is society falling apart?

Hello, Warren Murray bringing you Thursday’s headlines.

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Another death, another vigil – but when will we see real change?

Analysis: as an investigation into Bobbi-Anne McLeod’s murder opens, ONS figures reveal the stark reality of violence against women and girls

On Wednesday evening Smeaton’s Tower, a lighthouse on the waterfront in Plymouth, will be lit purple – an attempt to draw attention to violence against women in the wake of the death of 18-year-old Bobbi-Anne McLeod.

In the past year, vigils have been held for Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, for Sarah Everard and for Sabina Nessa. Candles have flickered in windows, tributes have been shared and women have taken to the streets after the high-profile killings, knowing that millions of other instances of abuse will never make a headline.

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Frank Turner on reconciling with his trans parent: ‘Miranda is a really nice person – my dad wasn’t’

The songwriter’s fractious relationship with his parent led to them becoming estranged for almost a decade – but after her transition, Miranda is reconnecting her son, who has written a song for her

A north London pub, walls dripping vinyl. Fingers white on an acoustic guitar, spittle roared on to microphone. For folk-punk star Frank Turner, it’s a gig like hundreds he has played on his 17-year path from squat parties to arenas. The song, though, is unlike any he’s performed before.

“My father is called Miranda these days,” he sings. “She’s a proud transgender woman and my resentment has started to fade …”

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I was a schoolboy chef at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel | review

Four decades after taking a part-time job in the city’s top hotel, our reviewer checks out its newly restored incarnation – and finds it as eye-popping as ever

The Grand Hotel is where I met the big bad world. In 1979, when I was 15, a work-experience place led to a part-time job as a commis chef, so I spent weekends as an underling in a huge, sweltering hotel kitchen full of moody, permanently hungover chefs preparing 1970s delicacies like prawn cocktail, black forest gateau and joints of meat and cauliflower cheese for the carvery restaurant.

I still have asbestos hands developed from handling sizzling pans, can chop carrots in that show-offy chef way and have a scar on my finger to prove it (all of which I’m still, ridiculously, quite proud of). I was constantly sworn at and occasionally shoved out of the way for messing up. It was an exhilarating and slightly terrifying crash course in growing up, and I loved every minute of it.

I left in 1981 and the hotel was boarded up for half of the following 40 years. It was easy to see why: the Grand had opened in 1879, and a century later the rickety back of house still felt Dickensian (thrillingly so in my eyes, though not the hotel inspector’s). The crumbling stonework had become so dangerous by 2002 that it was forced to close.

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Ironing has a rival for my affections – the matchless, marvellous joy of log-stacking | Adrian Chiles

Faced with a waist-high pile of logs, I sighed, and listlessly began moving them. Then, a complete surprise: I had never known absorption like it

Those of us with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder crave absorption more than most. It would help if I were blessed with more practical skills. Basic competences in carpentry, knitting or even Lego would be so useful to me in my search for peace. As I am sorely lacking in these departments, when I do find a task to lose myself in, it is a source of great joy. Pooterishly, I have written before about a lockdown love I developed for ironing, my ardour for which is undimmed, but now it has a rival for my affection: log-stacking.

A great load was discharged from the side of the log man’s van. I looked at the waist-high pile and sighed. Almost all previous experience in my life of tidying or imposing order merely constituted moving piles of stuff from one place to another. Pointless.

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