Snodgrass
Entry updated 29 August 2025. Tagged: Film.
Short UK tv film (2013), originally shown as part of the series Playhouse Presents. Warp Films. Directed by David Blair. Written by Ian R MacLeod and David Quantick, based on MacLeod's story "Snodgrass" (in In Dreams, anth 1992, ed Paul J McAuley and Kim Newman). Cast includes Annette Badland, Kevin Doyle, Ian Hart and Emma Stansfield. 24 minutes. Colour.
In 1991, John Lennon (Hart) is on the dole and behind on his rent, having quit The Beatles and the music industry in 1962 after an argument over which song to release as their debut single. The story's initial Jonbar Point is the decision to release "How Do You Do It?" rather than "Love Me Do", which leads to Lennon being estranged from Paul McCartney and the rest of the band. As he goes to the job centre to take up a lowly position in a warehouse Lennon reminisces on what might have been, especially when his interviewer recognizes him, though it is clear that without him The Beatles were only moderately successful. Raging against "Snodgrasses", his term for conformists and jobsworths, he walks out of the job. Returning home, his landlady tells him McCartney had visited to tell Lennon that he was right about which Beatles single to release, but Lennon had missed his call.
It is hard to avoid some nagging doubts about the premise of this alternate history, as it stretches credibility to think that thirty years on anyone would recognize or care about someone who had left a band who never achieved greatness or huge popularity. Otherwise it is a beautifully judged short film, achieving considerable poignancy in a short running time in its depiction of a life lived almost entirely in regrets and bitterness. Hart perfectly captures Lennon's wit and asperity, and in this Alternate History his complete obliviousness to the fact that no one else finds him funny or charming. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry