It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! review – the Beatles' Sgt Pepper … without the tunes

This documentary about Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band picks up where Ron Howard left off – without any of the band’s music or even images

Related: The Beatles: Sgt Pepper 50th Anniversary Edition review – peace, love and rock star ennui

It’s not easy to make a documentary about the greatest album in history when you don’t have access to a single note of the music, but this documentary forges on and cashes in regardless, perhaps assuming its target audience already knows the band’s back catalogue (or won’t realise there’s no Beatles music in it). It cannily picks up the story where last year’s “official” doc – Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week – left off: the pivotal year of 1967, when the band gave up touring, recorded Sgt Pepper and met the Maharishi. This history is raked over by greying, second-tier talking heads in granular detail, right down to the design of the “get well soon” card John Lennon drew for George Harrison’s sister-in-law. But without the supporting music, or even images, there’s a dancing-about-architecture feel to the whole exercise. A good 10 minutes is devoted to the album’s iconic sleeve design, for example, without ever showing the sleeve itself.