Boxing Day 1967 was when it all came together for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - not only did they enjoy a novelty hit with 'I'm the Urban Spaceman' and television exposure thanks to Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones's Pre-Python children's series DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET, they also had a cameo in a film that was premiered that day on BBC1. A film starring a moderately popular beat combo of the era, of whom you might have heard. They were the Beatles, of course, and their film was MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR.<br /><br />As it was coming together for the Bonzos, for the Beatles, things were falling apart fast. Brian Epstein, their manager and mentor, was dead, and this film - their first movie project without Epstein's guiding hand or Richard Lester behind the camera - was thrashed mercilessly by the critics, and this clearly still rankles with Paul McCartney decades later. But however much he wants the world to believe that this film was ahead of its time, how it was the predecessor to the modern rock video clip, how it influenced Monty Python and saved the whale to boot, there's no getting around the elephant in this particular sitting room. Put simply, MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR is a shambles. Badly filmed, badly lit, badly staged, badly acted, badly edited and badly scripted (by McCartney, it must be said, though I can understand his insistence that the whole thing was improvised - I sure wouldn't want to take any credit for this fiasco unless someone held a gun to my temple), this fifty minute splurge of drug-fuelled self-indulgent excess takes a lot of patience to sit through, even if you're a Beatles fan. What could have been a good-natured romp simply comes across as someone else's dreary home movies intercut with a zero-budget student film project by pretentious stoners. There are some good songs here - Flying, I Am the Walrus, Your Mother Should Know and the joyous title track - but absolutely nothing to prop them up. Surrealism only really works when it's juxtaposed with some form of reality, which is why TOUR flops so badly - there's nothing here that even points towards reality. I've heard every conceivable excuse for TOUR's incompetence - "it's supposed to be experimental", "they were trying something different", "they never claimed to be film-makers", "it's supposed to be offbeat and silly" - and there lies the problem. There's a grain of truth in all these statements. TOUR was trying too hard to be a hundred and one different things at once, and ultimately buckled under its own indecision.