BBC America, 11:00 p.m. ET
Tonight, Graham Norton’s British TV program makes room for the ultimate talk-show guest: the Queen. Well, not the actual, current Queen of England, but the actress who has taken over the regal role in the new season of Netflix’s The Crown. Yes, Olivia Colman is a scheduled guest tonight, as are Helena Bonham Carter and Chadwick Boseman.
TCM, 12:00 a.m. ET
Richard Lester directed this 1964 movie musical, one of the best of its genre, and certainly a film that fed as well as dramatized and captured the phenomenon of Beatlemania. (Someone ought to write a book about the impact of the visual artistry of The Beatles – and I’m working on it.) The music, even 55 years later (yes, you read that right), is fresh and fantastic: the title song, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Should Have Known Better,” “This Boy,” “And I Love Her,” “Tell Me Why,” and so on. Wow. And this is the movie in which George Harrison met Pattie Boyd, a 20-year-old British model cast as a Beatle-loving schoolgirl. Two years later, they were married. A handful of years after that, Harrison’s best friend, Eric Clapton, fell deeply in love with her, and wrote about his then-unrequited love in the classic song “Layla.” And shortly after that, Pattie left Harrison – for Clapton. That’s quite a love song…