Filming: A Hard Day’s Night

The Beatles filmed parts of A Hard Day’s Night at Twickenham Film Studios in the morning and afternoon, and in between visited London’s Dorchester Hotel to attend a Variety Club awards dinner.

This was the first of two days spent filming studio corridor scenes. The Beatles also gave interviews to Peter Noble for the BBC radio show Movie-Go-Round, broadcast on the Light Programme service on Sunday 12 April from 3-4pm.

The Beatles were more than familiar with hard work, but this day was evidently unusually busy. On this date, at the end of filming, an exhausted Ringo Starr uttered the phrase “It’s been a hard day’s night”, which was swiftly adopted as the title for The Beatles first film.

We went to do a job, and we’d worked all day and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said, ‘It’s been a hard day…’ and I looked around and saw it was dark so I said, ‘…night!’ So we came to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.

It was not, however, a new phrase. It had appeared in John Lennon‘s book In His Own Write, published on 23 March 1964, although Lennon always attributed it to Starr.