There's no need to airbrush the Beatles' wives – just let them be

It’s said that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. In the case of the famous, there’s an existential dry run with biopics – though they may not always look like your life.

Ringo Starr says he asked for script changes for the Sam Mendes film project. Four films are planned – one for each Beatle – with Starr played by Barry Keoghan. While pleased now, Starr felt the initial script didn’t reflect him or Maureen (his first wife, who died of leukaemia in 1994): “‘That’s not how we were,’ I’d say. ‘We would never do that.’”

This reminds me of a niggle watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the 2021 restoration of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary, Let It Be. It only clicked on the second viewing: the Beatles’ wives have undergone a modicum of deepfakery/airbrushing. The men have, too: in some scenes Paul McCartney has the shine of a freshly glazed doughnut. But Linda McCartney and Maureen especially are blandly smoothed – unnecessarily prettified, veritable Chat GPT versions of themselves.

It's perhaps a side-effect of the restoration techniques but it’s still an outrageous liberty, especially when considering the superior reality of Maureen’s working-class fizz, and Linda’s proto-vintage individualism. It’s so nice to learn that Starr wants to see his real Maureen. We all do.

From the band that gave us Paperback Writer to the news that literature is the new arm candy. Dior’s incoming creative director, Jonathan Anderson, has launched a series of literature-themed tote bags, including: Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs de Mal; Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses; and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for those with an inner goth.

Rihanna has been spotted with the Dracula: a triumph of, erm, structured cotton, and (double erm) a steal at £2,500. The literary bag has been done before – from 1984 cross-body clutches to Wuthering Heights satchels – but this is next level. Though if the humble bookworm just got a glow up, it may provoke one of those waves of moral panic like those when people are shown to prefer film and television adaptations to original works. Now you don’t even have to turn on a screen for your literature fix, just sling on the designer bag.

Speaking of the moral vapours, everyone to their stations; it upsets Kirstie Allsopp when she can’t see us working. On Tuesday morning, the TV property doyenne posted a photo of an empty tube carriage with the words: “Don’t know quite what it says but it can’t be a good thing.”