The fifth Beatle – it’s a sobriquet bestowed on a series of individuals who, over the years, got close enough to the Fab Four to be irradiated by their celebrity. For three years in the mid-Sixties, Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, found himself close enough to the eye of the hurricane to earn auxiliary Beatle status.

On the eve of a DVD reissue of a dazzlingly restored print of Help!, Lester muses on the impact of Beatle-mania on those caught in its slip-stream. “I suppose for everyone who has been through it, however briefly, you’re never as innocent as you were before. I keep the drawbridge up even now, when my son is better known in the business than I am.”

It’s a typically self-effacing comment from a man whose diverse career includes the Goons’ television show, The Knack . . . And How To Get It, Petulia and Superman II and III. Fans in the industry range from Steven Soderbergh to Brad Bird, Hal Hartley to Martin Scorsese. His work with the Beatles was so inventive and so influential in carving out the vernacular of the modern music video that he was named “the father of MTV” by the channel. Famously, Lester immediately wrote back asking for a paternity test.

Lester witnessed first hand the voracious press attention that surrounded the Beatles in the mid-Sixties and how they coped with it. “They were very protective of each other. If somebody was feeling off, the others would kind of compensate and surround them. It was a very warm thing to see.” Who was most likely to get depressed? “I think that the one that seemed to be suffering at the time probably was Ringo. But they all dealt with it in different ways.”

Although associated with the British film industry, Lester was in fact born in Philadelphia. Something of a child prodigy, he started school at the age of 3 and went to university at 15, where he found himself surrounded by people “three years bigger, smarter and better dressed”. Disillusioned by his course in clinical psychology, Lester spent his time playing the piano and perfecting the ultimate martini.

A television director by the age of 19, Lester left America. “I felt that there was a huge world that I felt more in tune with. I went to Europe and lived by my wits for about a year.” He arrived in Britain by a happy accident six months before the launch of ITV, when TV directors were in demand.

A stint directing three series of the Goons’ television show was good grounding for Lester’s collaboration with the Beatles, who shared with him a taste for the surreal and the downright silly. “If the film holds up,” Lester says of Help!, “it’s probably because silliness doesn’t date.” It was a silliness that, certainly during the filming of Help! in the Bahamas, was assisted by the Beatles’ consumption of vast quantities of the local herb.

“I didn’t demand a standard of professionalism and get stroppy with them,” says Lester. “If they wanted to indulge in certain substances, well, that’s fine.” He’s quick to put things into perspective however. “They weren’t lying in some sort of stupor, it’s not heroin that we’re talking about. They were giggling.”

Lester recalls a seven-hour transAtlantic flight during which the Beatles were higher than the aeroplane for most of the journey. “The boys were giggling, and my son was three at the time. And there’s nothing a three-year-old likes better than to see people laughing, so he laughed for seven hours as well. At that time, it was very popular for Paul to be given teddy bears by his fans. So suddenly, a little tractor pulling two wagon loads of teddy bears turned up in front of the plane. My son just disappeared for the rest of the journey under this mound of teddies.”

Lester has been retired from film-making for about 15 years, a decision he says that was prompted partly by the advent of digital technology. “I don’t understand computers and I’m a terrible neo-Luddite. I snarl when I go past my wife’s computer. I don’t own a mobile phone.”

Watching Help! again for the first time in 35 years – the restored print was screened at the San Sebastian Film Festival – was a bittersweet experience for Lester. “I deliberately don’t see the films. It’s painful. I’m constantly trying to correct them. I said once, long ago, that looking at one’s films is like a series of tombstones held together by editing tape.”

Lester is a consummate story-teller, and he clearly enjoys revisiting the memories that the film arouses. Scenes purporting to be at Buckingham Palace, he recalls, were shot at the home of Lord Astor, who was then bed-bound, convalescing from a heart attack.

The crew of Help! decided to organise a relay race around the boxwood maze in the gardens, causing much derision from the Beatles. Lord Astor was sufficiently interested to offer a prize to the winning team – a bottle of vintage champagne from his cellar.

“Come lunchtime, everybody has changed into their trainers. Suddenly the Beatles have turned up, the gun goes off and they wipe the floor with the lot of them. Then we all trooped up to collect the prize which John immediately rejected, ‘Forget that, can I have a try on your oxygen?’ So they all sat around on his bed, chatting, and finished his bottle of oxygen.”

Help! is released on DVD on Nov 5 by Apple Corps Ltd/EMI Music

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