7 days until the start of the Get Back sessions
We don’t know what Paul McCartney and his father discussed the morning of Boxing Day 1968, but we can be certain it was a lot more pleasant than their conversation a year earlier.
“My dad brought the bad news into me this morning like the figure of doom,” Paul told Ray Connolly as published in the December 27, 1967, issue of the Evening Standard. The broad consensus had spoken, the BBC’s broadcast of Magical Mystery Tour endured “scorching” and “scathing” reviews, in Connolly’s words. The story was under the headline: “Maybe we goofed, says Beatle Paul.”
“I suppose if you look at it from the point of view of good Boxing Day entertainment we goofed really,” Paul said.
We don’t know much about how the Beatles spent December 26, 1968, but if they pondered on Boxing Days past, you’d have to think they were happy with their situation.
If the group had any kind of crisis of confidence, by now it should have been restored. A “Hey Jude” and White Album will do that, between its commercial and critical success.
An ad in the December 15, 1968, Boston Globe.
Magical Mystery Tour, meanwhile just finished a brief run at a Boston theater, one of just a couple American showings of the film late in 1968 — it wasn’t broadcast on American TV. It wouldn’t see a widespread cinematic release in the country until 1974.
And now, the band was exactly a week from taking another stab at a TV show, a documentary of them working in the studio preparing for a concert.
They May Be Parted 
