Tim Byron was never really a Beatles fan. He owned exactly one Beatles CD, a copy of Number Ones that he and his wife discovered they both had when they moved in together, and he knew the songs the way most of us do, from the radio. So it’s a little surprising that he’s the man who wrote a play about the band. As he tells Andrew G in this episode of Showtime, it all began with a photograph.
He was unwinding at home after a show one Friday night, watching an ABC documentary on Australian rock history, when a short clip of The Beatles stepping off a plane flashed past. John, Paul, George and… Jimmie? Tim had never heard of him. Then came the image that stopped him cold: a lone man sitting by himself at Essendon Airport, the morning after the biggest night of his life.
That man was Jimmie Nicol, a London session drummer plucked from obscurity in 1964 when Ringo Starr fell ill with tonsillitis days before the band’s tour. Jimmie had roughly two hours to rehearse before he was on a plane. He did have a head start: he’d already recorded one of those budget “Beatlemania” records, where unknown session musicians covered the hits of the day, so he knew the songs. He spent 13 days as a member of the biggest band in the world, including their Australian dates, then was handed a watch and a fee and sent home without even a chance to say goodbye. One night he was playing to a full house in Adelaide. The next morning he was waiting alone at the airport. Tim calls it unceremonious, and, in context, genuinely sad.
What gripped him wasn’t the Beatles, it was the story: a man shot from nowhere into the spotlight and then straight back to nowhere. Not many things grab Tim, who cheerfully describes himself as pretty concrete, but this one did. He Googled to see whether anyone had told it on stage or screen and found only a book. After 50 years, he figured, he’d have a go.
The path from idea to opening night was anything but smooth. Tim wrote a film script over a single weekend and is the first to admit it was terrible, breaking every rule in the book. He pitched it to the three Melbourne production companies that accept unsolicited scripts. Only one wrote back, with a polite but firm request not to bother them again. So the script went in a drawer, until it occurred to him that he already worked in theatre and should simply write it as a play. Pitching that to around 15 theatre companies was a slog too, until his mate Michael kept pushing and the Basin Theatre finally said yes.
When it premiered in 2024, Tim hoped for 20 people a night, then dared to hope for 50. By the end of the run, the house was full, around 120 people every night paying to watch something he’d written, directed and produced. Saying that sentence out loud, he admits, doesn’t sound right. Yet here he is, staring down a second season.
The most surprising thing about Tim may be how recently he found any of this. He didn’t start theatre until he was 40, newly single and at a loose end in Frankston. He Googled “theatre near me”, found the local theatre group holding auditions the next day, and got a part. At school he’d been far too tough for drama (he was, he thinks, a tree). He’s convinced everyone has a thing, whether it’s bike riding or stamp collecting, and for him the thing turned out to be theatre. What keeps him coming back is camaraderie: a group of people going through the same process together, then the buzz of the stage.
On stage, Tim reports, he simply doesn’t get nervous. He feels best when he’s calm and clear-headed and knows his lines, a trait his wife insists is not normal. His other self-diagnosis is more modest. He’s a famously poor dancer, and when he and Andrew worked together on The Boy From Oz, he quietly stopped going on stage for the dance numbers. Nobody ever asked where he’d gone.
His passion for community theatre runs deep. Back in 2013, he made a Channel 31 series called Theatreworld, following a single production from auditions through to dress rehearsal in each episode, simply to show people that there was good theatre being made within a few kilometres of their homes. It was, he says, far more work than it needed to be. He’s endlessly fascinated by the doctors, lawyers, teachers and tradies who go home and perform like professionals, and he reckons community theatre sometimes undersells itself. He’s less sentimental about the sherry at interval (COVID killed the free meals), or about audiences who rustle chip packets as if they were watching Netflix at home.
As a writer, Tim is disarmingly honest. He calls himself the world’s laziest man and an undisciplined, inspiration-driven writer who once sat on a half-finished comedy for a year before forcing himself to finish it. He’s written other plays, including a football comedy about people who can’t accept other points of view and a semi-autobiographical story about growing up in Melbourne in the 70s and 80s, but he still won’t call himself a playwright. A friend told him that if he keeps saying he isn’t a writer, he never will be. Tim’s answer is that it feels like imposter syndrome, and that he’d cringe if he said it out loud.
Directing was a new experience too. Jimmie the Beatle was his first time in the director’s chair, and the second time around he’s much more comfortable, trying to educate his cast as well as direct them. Back on stage as an actor, he admits he immediately reverts to wanting to be left alone to get on with it.
He’s equally relaxed about criticism. Negative feedback mostly makes him laugh, and he doesn’t believe in trying to please everyone. Even the Beatles, he points out, have a fifth of the population who don’t like them. As for fidelity to history, the play is around 95 percent fact, and if true fans spot the odd liberty (he handed a famous line from John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi to Jimmie’s father instead), so be it. It’s PG and light on purpose, with a second season in cabaret seating, so audiences can bring their own drinks and nibbles.
The play deliberately ends where it began, with Jimmie alone in that chair, and Tim leaves what happened next unresolved on purpose. His hope is that people leave the theatre curious enough to go home and look up the rest of Jimmie Nicol’s story.
Jimmie the Beatle plays from 20 November to 6 December at the Mount Eliza Community Centre, presented by Frankston Theatre Group.
Jimmie the Beatle tickets: frankstontheatregroup.org.au Bookings: ftgtickets@gmail.com or 0437 117 881
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