Tales Of The Country: When Beatlemania hit Tenbury Wells

In my office, all but blocking out the sunlight, is a frankly awesome reference book called The Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy. As the heaviest object within reach, it is probably what I would use to belt a surprise intruder over the head. To dispatch a burglar with a volume comprising the credits of the otherwise useless 1981 ITV sitcom Take a Letter, Mr Jones..., starring John Inman and Rula Lenska, would be peculiarly satisfying.

Anyway, I have for some years been mildly curious about the compiler of The Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy, a Mark Lewisohn, as there is also a Mark Lewisohn widely considered to be the world's pre-eminent chronicler of The Beatles. So when I found out that a Mark Lewisohn and his wife had booked to stay in one of our cottages over the Easter holiday, I wondered whether it would be the Beatles bod or the comedy bod, or whether they were perhaps one and the same. And, good-day sunshine, so it was. Or, rather, so they were.

I told Mark how much I use his comedy guide, in what I hope was not an overly ingratiating, Basil Fawlty kind of way, although I suppose it would have been apt to invoke the spirit of Basil (first unleashed on a BBC2 audience, I can tell you authoritatively, on Friday 19 September 1975). Whatever, we became quite pally. Mark told me that he is updating his comedy guide for publication in October, and also that he is writing a biography of The Beatles in the year 1963.

Which takes us, or at any rate took him, 20 minutes along a long and definitely winding road from Docklow to Tenbury Wells, a lovely little town straddling the river Teme. Once Mark had booked to spend Easter here, he checked The Complete Beatles Chronicle (author: M Lewisohn) and found, to his delight, that The Beatles had played the Riverside Dancing Club in the Bridge Hotel, Tenbury Wells, on Easter Monday 40 years earlier. He kindly gave me a copy of the notice in the Tenbury Wells Advertiser: on Easter Saturday at the Riverside in 1963, Erkie Grant and the Tonnets. On the Monday, The Beatles, supported by El Riot and the Rebels (3s/6d to members).

With his wife, Anita Epstein (regrettably, no relation to The Beatles' manager Brian), Mark found that the Bridge Hotel is not only still there but largely unchanged. He even spoke to Alec Cook, who had been on the door that night but proudly couldn't remember a thing about it, and his wife, Jean, who recalled booking The Beatles a few months earlier for £100.

Since the booking, the band had had a No 1 hit with "Please Please Me". And "From Me to You", also destined for No 1, had been released the Thursday before. Yet Epstein (Brian, not Anita) insisted on honouring all the dates already in the band's diary. "In 1963, there would", said Mark, "have been some element of Beatlemania in Tenbury Wells, although it was a localised phenomenon. There were little pockets of Beatlemania all over the country, and eventually they joined up. But Fleet Street didn't pick up on it until the October."

Mark was also able to tell me that the night before they played the Riverside Dancing Club, John, Paul, George and Ringo had met The Rolling Stones – at the Crawdaddy in Richmond – for the first time. And the following night, they made their BBC television debut. So the Bridge Hotel, Tenbury Wells, loomed large in an eventful week in the evolution of The Beatles. How improbable, and how fab.

Operator, give me Docklow five-five-two

In Hereford the other day, my wife Jane bought a telephone. And not just any telephone, but an old-fashioned Dial M for Murder-style telephone, made in Belgium from Bakelite, which is a nice alternative to being made in Scotland from girders, as the old Irn Bru ads used to say.

It is particularly handsome even by the standards of old telephones, with decorative gold inlay, and a lovely twiddly cord. Best of all, it still works. We have put it on our hall table, where it shrieks to be picked up by Miss Marple or, being Belgian, Hercule Poirot.

It nods, perhaps, in the general direction of tweeness, yet it looks just right in the big, old entrance hall of a big, old house in the country. Certainly, there is a temptation to answer it and say, "Docklow faive-faive-two", or to remark to an obviously eavesdropping operator, "Will you please stop listening in, Miss Medlicott."

The children, needless to say, are delighted with the novelty of dialling, just as 30-odd years ago the novelty of push-button telephones thrilled Jane and me. They listen intently when we tell them that we grew up – in what they insist on referring to as the "olden days" – having to dial rather than push. But I have a feeling the novelty will fade the first time they are required to press the hash key twice.

Which comes first, the chicken or the teenager?

We have a broody bantam. Amber, or it might be Ginger, or possibly Babs, sits for hours on end in the hen- house trying to hatch the unhatchable. The nice woman at the Wernlas Collection, the rare-breeds centre near Ludlow where we bought our bantams, says we must disturb her as often as possible – "although I'm afraid she'll swear at you". Which indeed she does, and pecks, too. So either we get a fertilised egg for her to sit on, or we buy a cockerel so that she can do the whole business properly, or we put up with her frustration and her moods. Which at least is good preparation for when our children eventually hit their teens.