Before mobile phones, being filmed was very rare – and if you were, you acted naturally. Today, our relationship to the camera is very, very different

Not for the first time, I got something wrong. As someone who made a living being on camera, I developed theories about what it takes to be yourself on screen. My main thought was that everyone in the world would soon be able to do it, because they’d be getting so much practice.

Once upon a time, hardly anybody was filmed or videoed. When the head of my middle school announced in assembly one morning that there would be television cameras in the dinner hall at lunchtime, every child woke up. For once the headteacher had our full and undivided attention. Consternation was in the air. This would have been about 1979. Regional television news probably needed pictures to cover a story about school dinners or something. Nobody, but nobody, in the school that day missed that evening’s edition of Midlands Today. It was a big deal. I saw the back of my head, and was agog.

Backstory of modest industry veteran who started out as one half of pop duo Peter and Gordon, and went on to produce acts such as James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt

Rock’n’roll is notorious for its tales of bad behaviour: throwing TVs out of the window, mountains of cocaine, parades of groupies … but you won’t find any of that here. Peter Asher, brother of Jane, one half of Peter and Gordon, and super-successful producer of acts such as James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, appears to be about as nerdish and clean-living as a 60s/70s music industry veteran could be. Although that might just be what he wants us to think; what are the chances Asher is a complete reprobate away from the camera, and is just brilliant at hiding it? That glasses and ruffled shirt front combo definitely reminds you of someone a tad more sleazy, even before Asher himself reminds you about it in the final credits.

Whatever the truth, Asher by any standards carved an amazing path, making the absolute most of being in the right place at the right time. Smartly structured around Asher’s anecdotes-and-music live show, the film stitches together a collection of clips, audio and musical performances that gallops through his personal backstory. His luckiest break, of course, was that his early partnership with schoolfriend Gordon Waller (modelled, it turned out, on the Everly Brothers) benefited from cast-off songs handed over by his sister’s boyfriend, one Paul McCartney; there’s an amusing moment where we hear John Lennon’s sneer at the lyric of what would become Peter and Gordon’s first and biggest hit, A World Without Love: “Please lock me away …” “Yes”. While the film clearly acknowledges the debt to McCartney’s songwriting (which presumably Lennon vetoed for the Beatles), it’s perhaps not quite ready to admit that without this connection, none of what followed would have happened at all.