Not for the first time in either of our lives, we owe a woman an apology. But, as we usually argue, it's not entirely our fault.
In our first season we did an episode about Iain Softley's 1994 film Backbeat. Give it a listen.
Backbeat
We discuss how Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon are depicted, and how the casting choice of Stephen Dorff impacts Beatles fans' view of Stuart to this day.
Listen on SpotifyIn it we mention a cameo by Freda Kelly - who was employed by Brian Epstein and The Beatles from 1962 to 1972, and president of their fan club - playing George Harrison's mother, Louise Harrison/French, who sees him off at the docks before the band sets sail for Hamburg. But, as commenters on Spotify often get far more pleasure than is healthy from telling us, we've got something wrong. It's not Freda Kelly. It's a Liverpudlian actor called Frieda Kelly. Here she is in the scene, with Chris O'Neill playing George.
We discovered this error three years later when we covered Ryan White's 2013 documentary Good Ol' Freda. You can listen to this too.
Good Ol' Freda
We and this film explore the life of fan club president Freda Kelly, who spent a decade working closely alongside Brian Epstein and the Beatles from 1962.
We actually recorded a short section of this in which we made reference again to Freda being in Backbeat, then later, when looking for the clip to add to the episode, realised it's not her. So we edited it out to avoid any further damage to an already-paper thin reputation.
But we left it in the Backbeat episode: while we try to get facts right, the podcast is intended to be discursive, not a watertight contribution to the historical record, and we're happy for our mistakes to be included if they add to the episode being interesting or entertaining. And removing bits from a three-year-old episode feels a bit Stalinist.
Frieda Kelly was active on TV in the 1980s and 1990s, including an episode of Liverpool soap Brookside, and this appearance as a snooty jewellery shop assistant (whose posh accent slips brilliantly into scouse when she's rattled) in the 1995 TV film Rich Deceiver.
The two women have separate IMDb pages. Here's Freda's. It includes the erroneously awarded credit as Mrs Harrison in Backbeat. It also includes a credit as Woman in Doorway in 1988's The Dressmaker which, while I can't find a clip of it that includes her scene, I'm guessing also belongs on Frieda's.
Freda's IMDb includes ten credits as herself, all in Beatles documentaries or archive footage. What seems to be her only actual acting credit is as "Passenger on the Bus (uncredited)" in Magical Mystery Tour, which frankly is a more impressive CV than most could reasonably hope for.
The specific source of our mistake will have been Backbeat's user-submitted IMDb trivia list, which states that the role of Mrs Harrison is a cameo: "Frieda [sic] Kelly, who plays George Harrison's mother, was a secretary of The Beatles' Fan Club in its earliest days." Because AI search summaries are generated by sources like IMDb, you'll find this error reinforced in some Google search results too.
We have previous for this. When we discussed the 2000 film Two of Us, we noted that its writer Mark Stanfield had only one other IMDb credit to his name: as a driver on the 2014 film Robot Overlords.
Two of Us
We unpack the 2000 TV movie dramatisation of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's final meeting in 1976 New York, starring Jared Harris and Aidan Quinn.
It was later pointed out to us that this was incorrect by Mark himself, when we met him and his wife at the Watford Palace Theatre in 2024, before a performance of the stage adaptation of Two of Us, directed by Scot Williams. Mark had never heard of Robot Overlords: his IMDb had become elided with that of another Mark Stanfield; one far more eager than he to chauffeur robots around. This humiliation was frankly no less than we deserved. He was very nice about it and their IMDb pages have now been separated. I might have even done that myself.
You'd have to imagine, though, that while Frieda Kelly was cast as Louise Harrison because she'd give a good performance, which she undoubtedly did, surely Iain Softley enjoyed the Easter egg of casting someone with almost the same name as the Beatles' fan club president, in a scene which already contains a nod to another notable figure from the early days. Note in the clip above the name of the ship, Mona's Queen: a reference to Mona Best, Pete Best's mother, owner of the Casbah, where the Quarrymen and the Beatles played. And maybe also to Brian's mother Queenie Epstein.
And you've got to give kudos to both Frieda and Freda Kelly, neither of whom seemingly tried to correct this, mainly, you suspect, because they're either unaware of it or have better things to do. But if they or their families get in touch and want me to, I'll happily update the IMDb pages. We might as well get something right.
