It sometimes feels as if a week doesn’t go by without a legacy-building documentary about Paul McCartney. The latest is this geeky tale about the 1961 Höfner bass guitar, the unmistakable violin-shaped instrument which, as a teenager in 1961, he bought for the equivalent of £30 in Hamburg, and which became a part of the Beatles’ iconography. After the band split, it went missing and was finally recovered in 2024, after more than 50 years, thanks to some dogged detective work, initiated by Nick Wass, a Höfner employee, and involving a certain ambulance service worker called Steve Glenister who responded to Wass’s calls for information, but was weirdly reluctant to say quite how much he knew.
It is an amiable tale with a happy ending but, oddly, the film can’t quite absorb the sadness, and even shame, that are disclosed in the denouement. Stealing by people who are hard up, and for whom opportunistic thievery is an instinctive mode of survival and whose grownup children may not, a generation later, want to think about what their parents did – these are big, sombre ideas with big sombre implications that don’t quite mesh with the documentary’s happy mood board.
