TV Reviews : An Admiring ’48 Hours’ Fails to Reveal McCartney

A few months back, Paul McCartney’s own production company released an hourlong documentary on its leader, mixing band rehearsal footage with predictably unrevealing interview clips, that aired on Showtime. Now, an outside company has produced a 90-minute special focusing around McCartney’s recent tour that manages to be even more facile and fawning than the one concocted by his in-house crew. The adoring Beatlemaniacs in question: CBS News.

Says none other than Dan “Fab” Rather, introducing tonight’s extended edition of “48 Hours” (airing at 8 on Channels 2 and 8) and stamping the imprimatur of serious journalism on this profile, the show’s crew was given “extraordinary access to the man . . . the music . . .”--no, don’t say it, Dan!--”the memories.”

And what memories they are, as we relive for the trillion-to-the-tenth time McCartney’s recollection of Lennon’s true responsibility for the Beatles’ breakup and his subsequent coming to terms with his former partner, unchallenged by any other version of the facts.

Early segments of the show focus on tour crew members and fans observed during the “48 Hours” team’s two-day visit to Chicago--a middle-aged fan who stays on the elusive Macca’s barely warm trail through hotels and alleyways; the head of the lighting crew, who repeats the thought that Michelangelo might be doing his same job were he alive today; a ticket scalper who gets arrested by undercover agents outside the hall, saying the reason that he got hoodwinked by plainclothes police is “because Paul McCartney’s crowd is too damn old.”

Once the team catches up with the man himself, the talk turns to Beatles, Beatles, Beatles--and you can just imagine how interested the notoriously guarded McCartney is in divesting himself of previously unknown secrets about those days. Finally, wife Linda interrupts from the balcony of their suite: “I think the questions are hard. . . .”

“You think the questions are old?” inquires correspondent Bernard Goldberg, ready to flog himself. “You’ve heard ‘em all before?”

“Some of ‘em,” Linda charitably backtracks. Later, asked about fan feelings that she and Yoko Ono helped break up the Beatles, she responds, “I barely comment on this anymore”--and given the brutally predictable lines of interrogation, you’re ready to cheer her on to even greater noncompliance.

And then it’s up to Rather, back at the ranch, to sum up this hour and a half of not getting to know Paul by reminding us that “there’s comfort in that we can still be moved by the music. As Danny and the Juniors said, ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay.’ ” Say, what is the frequency, Kenneth?