Episode 134 - Blinded By Yesterday

July-August 2019 saw the release of two quite similar films: British jukebox musicals centred around the work of a legendary classic rock artist and its impact on a young British-Asian man. These two films were Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle's Yesterday, starring Himesh Patel as a budding singer-songwriter who wakes up from a coma to find the Beatles no longer exist and he can make it big by stealing their songs, and Gurinder Chadha's Blinded By The Light, starring Viveik Kalra as a teenager growing up in 1980s Luton as a working class child of immigrant parents, who finds inspiration in the music of Bruce Springsteen. One film is one of the best of the year, and one is the very worst, so we compare the two directly - from the extreme Toryism of Yesterday to the beautifully solidaristic, class-and-race-conscious Blinded... . Needless to say, one film flopped and one was a massive hit. The score to this episode is by Crazy Moose, who covered a variety of songs, mainly by the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, but also by the Stones and TV composer Howard Goodall.