Next year there will be an official Anthology book a radio series and the release of the Anthology videos with value-added material

Next year, there will be an official Anthology book, a radio series, and the release of the Anthology videos, with value-added material.The potential income is astonishing. The American television station ABC has supposedly paid $20 million for the documentary, ITV a further pounds 5 million, and as many as 40 other countries could screen it. Forbes magazine has estimated that the project - TV, CDs, videos, books - will earn the Beatles more than $100 million.But why is it all happening now? Serendipity Aspinall has been working to this end since the Seventies. The band members supposedly vetoed an earlier, shorter version of the Anthology film in the Eighties.

But fresh impetus has come from George Harrison, whose financial difficulties arising from Handmade Films, the company he once ran, have overcome the strongest reluctance to disinter their past. Before, Aspinall always came up against the problem that, while he runs the company, actual control rests with its four shareholders - Paul, George and Ringo, and Yoko Ono (who controls Lennon's estate) - and they have found it hard to agree on anything, McCartney and Yoko in particular.Apple board meetings are convened in the London offices of Frere Cholmeley Bischoff, Apple's solicitors. Invariably chaired by one of the partners of Frere Cholmeley Bischoff, the meetings are Byzantine and often go on for days. The Beatles themselves rarely turn up; they send their international advisers.

In consequence, the whole business of the Beatles, as the millions rolling through Apple are painstakingly divided, has become a lawyer's and an accountant's dream. Some shareholders want dividends (pounds 18 million paid over the past ten years), and some want "promotional fees" (Yoko and Harrison received pounds 1.4 million each last year). McCartney gets money paid into his British holding company, MPL; Starr has part of his Apple stake transferred to companies whose ownership disappears into the Virgin Islands.Aspinall gets in on the game, too, by receiving payment through Standby Films, which is owned by him and his American wife, Susan, and which is cited in accounts as the company secretary of Apple. Standby was paid pounds 408,000 last year, but the figure doesn't appear in Apple's accounts: it is buried in a mass of largely unexplained administrative costs, some pounds 9 million last year.It may be unorthodox, but it works. In his dealings with the Beatles, Aspinall always makes sure that everything is endlessly checked with each shareholder.

Work on a third recording remains unfinished.Meanwhile, the process of assembling old footage for the Anthology series had been going on since January 1992. Strict care was taken to ensure that the four Beatles each received balanced screen time, and early episodes were re-edited time and again to accommodate each Beatle, plus Yoko The climax came in June 1994. They broke off in March 1994, then regrouped for several weeks in June and July "Free as a Bird" was finished this February. Then they turned their attentions to another Lennon tape, "Real Love", apparently unaware that the song had already been released on Lennon's Imagine soundtrack. On the final record, McCartney and Harrison duplicate the lush harmonies of Abbey Road, and then a stentorian drum break by Starr signals a Harrison guitar solo to bring the track to a close. But, as a playful nod to the Sixties, they inserted into an early mix a few words of Lennon talking - backwards, of course, like the so-called clue that had "authenticated" McCartney's death during the Beatles media madness that swept America in 1969.Careful not to strain their delicate camaraderie, the Beatles spaced out their sessions. But, actually, he had been toying with 30 song fragments, many of which became his final albums, Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey."Free as a Bird" was never completed, and the tape reveals little more than the bones of a lyric, with the same couple of lines repeated over a haunting melody.

In February 1994, McCartney, Harrison and Starr began the attempt to transform this Lennon sketch into a multi-layered Beatles masterpiece. They gathered at McCartney's East Sussex studio, The Mill, together with Jeff Lynne, former leader of the Electric Light Orchestra He was there as arbiter of disputes. Lynne and Harrison had been fellow members of the Travelling Wilburys, an ad hoc supergroup also comprising Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. He pitches it very high when he contends that, for a generation whose soaring hopes dwindled and fell with the end of the Sixties, the reunion might provide spiritual balm. It is hardly surprising that nerves are frayed.But the Anthology project is about more than money. A colleague of the Beatles from the Sixties says that seeing them together again, larking around at Apple, is "like having your kids home for Christmas".