Paul McCartney: Red Rose Speedway

WHEN PAUL MCCARTNEY's television special was aired several weeks ago, one of the ostensible aims was to provide a semi-biographical glimpse of the inner man, a kind of "getting to know him" in the words of an accompanying ABC press release. Instead, the show proved impersonal at best, with McCartney remote and distant from the camera, providing a portrait nowhere near as intimate, say, as some of the better scene-stealing he undertook in A Hard Day's Night. Ironically, the most engrossing moments fell when passersby were asked to sing snippets of Beatles' songs, and if the consequent production did nothing to heal McCartney's ongoing image problem, it certainly didn't help his musical offerings, which came off as forgettably ordinary and certainly disappointing.