George Martin and his celebrity interviewers

Arena's 90-minute profile of the Beatles producer Sir George Martin justified its feature length because, as it convincingly showed, there is so much more to Martin than his work with the Fab Four.

By my reckoning, in this roughly chronological account of Martin's life, the part of the story between his meeting the Beatles and their splitting up occupied only the half-hour between 45 and 75 minutes into the film.

Before that, we heard about Martin's RAF days and his time as a comedy record producer (Nellie the Elephant and Right Said Fred, among many others). And after, we saw his abandoned studio, and his charitable work in Montserrat, and found out about his deafness -which he attributes to sitting too long between the speakers in a studio control room.

Martin has always come across as a self-effacing gent who never tried to emulate the style of his protégés. The film gave us a nicely nuanced view of that: it turns out he consciously changed his accent to leave his humble North London origins behind and complete the image of the debonair smoothie seen in early photographs.

And, on the self-effacing front, he showed a steely edge: still bitter about Phil Spector producing the Let it Be album, and how, because he was an executive, he was denied the Christmas bonus which EMI's sales staff got thanks to the string of Beatles number-ones he'd produced.

What made the film distinctive was the use of a selection of well-chosen interviewers to chat to Martin about his life: Paul McCartney sorted through a pile of old photos with him; Ringo sat with him at a studio mixer desk discussing the finer points of Beatles' classics; Michael Palin was a fan of his comedy records; and Howard Goodall took him through his string orchestration of Eleanor Rigby.

With these genial but revealing conversations, and a few conventional interviews, such as with Cilla Black and Rolf Harris, no commentary was needed. Factual details were provided in on-screen text, of which, perhaps inevitably, there was a little more than felt ideal near the start of the film.

Overall, it was an elegant mix of the personal and the professional: Martin's wife Judy (above, with him in their car) featured strongly, as did his son Giles, one of the interviewers. Even his grandchildren appeared, helping him to organise an open day for his glorious garden one summer's day.

And 90 minutes allowed just enough time for those extra moments - such as Martin's charming demonstration of how to make the perfect Martini (shaken not stirred) - that might have been dropped from a shorter film.

I'm left with the image of Martin slumped in his armchair listening to his greatest hits on the stereo.

But was he really listening to the music we were hearing, or did the editor just use those shots to illustrate a piece of music when there wasn't anything else to show?