Get Back isn’t just about the Beatles. Here’s what it taught me about life today

There was much less plastic, much finer dressing and no time spent staring at screens - making room for extraordinary creativity

A lot of great stuff has been written about what the film Get Back has taught us about the Beatles. I wonder if I might chip in with what the film taught us about other stuff.

First, how much less plastic and packaging there was back then. Sandwiches were brought in on actual plates and tea was drunk from actual cups. Today, within a short walk of that building at 3 Savile Row in the West End of London, I make it 19 branches of Pret a Manger, 14 Starbucks, four Sainsbury’s, three Marks & Spencers and two Tescos. The making of that film about those rehearsals and that performance would today have generated skipfuls of bad stuff.

Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist