The Beatles

The Beatles stopped touring in 1966 and kept releasing singles, which left them with a problem nobody had solved before: how to appear on television programmes in a dozen countries in the same week without being in any of them. Their answer was to send film instead.

It started before the touring stopped. In November 1965 Joe McGrath filmed them miming to five songs in a single day at Twickenham, Ticket to Ride and We Can Work It Out among them. Six months later Michael Lindsay-Hogg took them into the grounds of Chiswick House for Paperback Writer and Rain, and in September 1968 shot Hey Jude and Revolution in one session, with three hundred people brought in to crowd around the piano for the coda. He later directed the Let It Be film, and afterwards videos for The Rolling Stones.

In 1967 they hired Peter Goldmann, a Swedish television director introduced to them by Klaus Voormann, for Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane — the two clips usually named when people date the beginning of the form. Paul McCartney directed Hello, Goodbye himself that November; British television could not show it, because the Musicians' Union had banned miming.

The last ones are quieter. Something was assembled by road manager Neil Aspinall from separate footage of each Beatle at home with his wife, filmed in the months before the break-up. Twenty-five years later Joe Pytka made Free as a Bird as a flight over the places in the songs.