A Hard Day's Night - Samira Ahmed

A Hard Day’s Night - Samira Ahmed

A conversation with Simon Shaps and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney 

Her mother made BBC programmes in Hindustani but young Samira Ahmed preferred to watch this film about The Beatles cocking a snook at deference and scattering from their fans ‘like an upturned jar of insects.’

Decades on, Ahmed celebrates a snapshot of a nation tied to its past while rushing to the future. By a canal George befriends a truant, an ‘intimacy of strangers’ of the kind we have lost. But there is no US-style segregation in the concert scenes, where brown faces attest to a multiracial Britain.

Another country? Simon Shaps, formerly of ITV, and the FT's veteran pop music critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney find out.