Pop Goes The Easel ~ The Start

With the advent of Beatlemania, this culminated in Richard Lester''s 1964 film hit, A Hard Day''s Night. It could be argued that such was the popularity of the Beatles at that time, almost anything they had chosen to do would have been successful, but Lester was special, he had shrewdly borrowed from the techniques of television advertising and the photography of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Anthony Armstrong-Jones to develop a style that would blow away the prevailing middle-aged industry attitudes and come to exemplify The Swinging Sixties. Dankworth also contributes the original theme for the first 1961 series of The Avengers. Pre Emma Peel and Cathy Gayle, it features Patrick MacNee and a superb Ian Hendry. And then for many, the artistic high point of television drama, The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan''s enigmatic political allegory that left a deep impression on audiences in 1967. The music underscores the final, controversial episode, Fall Out, Carmen Miranda''s Yi Yi Yi and (for the first time anywhere on compact disc) The Four Lads version of, Dry Bones, used to great effect by Number 6 and Number 48, Alexis Kanner.