Fifty years ago, not many TV directors would have turned down the opportunity to make a show starring Elvis Presley.

But that was what Steve Binder was planning to do – before a wiser friend persuaded him to change his mind.

It was a re-think that was to lead to one of the greatest comebacks in showbusiness history – an extended 90 minute version of which will be shown on Thursday, the 41st anniversary of the singer’s death, in 250 cinemas around the country.

It was however, a close-run thing. ‘I wasn’t an Elvis fan,’ Binder told me this week. ‘I was involved with the Beach Boys and Laura Nyro [the American singer songwriter] at the time, and had filmed the Rolling Stones.

I knew that Elvis was from Tupelo, Mississippi, which is pretty well the centre of the Bible Belt, and I thought, wrongly, he might be some kind of racist or redneck.’

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NBC offered Steve Binder the role of producing a Christmas special starring Elvis Presley (pictured) in 1968. An extended version of the special airs in cinemas nationwide on Thursday, 16th August in memory of the 41st anniversary of the singer’s death

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Elvis’s (pictured) career had been suffering at the time he was offered to star in the TV special as he struggled to chart in the Top Ten and many of his films were received badly

The great comeback: Elvis Presley’s special to air nationwide

That suspicion in itself would have been good enough reason to reject the offer, but there was more.

At the time, Elvis’s career was plummeting towards irrelevancy. Why would an ambitious young director want to become involved with a singer who might soon be a has-been?

Since leaving the US Army in 1960, Elvis had starred in over two dozen Hollywood films, almost every one worse than the one before.

And without a Top Ten hit in the US since 1966, by the late Sixties the movie studio doors had begun closing on him.

Seeing his cash cow no longer wanted in movieland, Elvis’s manager, the phoney ‘Colonel’, Tom Parker, turned to television, the medium that, in 1956, had made the singer a star overnight.

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Rock and roll history: An extended version of Elvis’ 1968 TV comeback special will be screened in cinemas up and down the UK on the 41st anniversary of his death on Thursday

His plan was for a one-hour Christmas special of yuletide songs. That was the show that Steve Binder was offered by the NBC network – and something that he absolutely did not want to do.

He’d been approached, he remembers, because he’d just made a hit show starring Petula Clark.

Harry Belafonte had been a guest star, and, while the two had been singing, Belafonte had touched Pet Clark’s forearm.

Touching each other is something singers tend to do when they sing as duos, but not on primetime US TV in 1968 when one is a black man and the other a white woman.

There was a huge media reaction. A line had been crossed in mainstream TV entertainment, and it had been Steve Binder, the man behind the cameras, who had dared to take the risk.

He, it was decided, was the right kind of brave, modern thinking, inventive director to take on Elvis.

But only when Binder’s musical director, Bones Howe, who had been a technician on several early Elvis hits, told him how good Elvis could be when he had the right people around him, did he agree to meet the singer.

A few days later, Elvis turned up at Binder’s office and the two of them sat down and talked.

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Steve Binder admits Elvis (pictured) was the opposite of how he expected him to be when they met at his office in discussions for the 1968 TV special

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Steve claims Elvis (pictured) was open and friendly. He revealed to Steve that he was unsure about television as he was unhappy with some appearances from earlier in his career

‘He was so open and friendly,’ Binder says, ‘I quickly realised he was the complete opposite of what I thought he was.

‘He asked me what stage I thought his career was at. So, I told him that I thought it was in the toilet.

‘He just stared at me for a minute. Then he laughed out loud and said: “At last someone is telling me the truth.”

‘He was unsure about television having been unhappy with some appearances early in his career, when he thought some of the producers had been laughing at him.

‘On one, they’d dressed him up in a white tie and tails, and he’d had to sing Hound Dog to a basset hound.’

Elvis hadn’t thought it was funny. ‘TV isn’t my turf,’ he told Binder.

‘So, what is your turf?’ Binder asked.

‘Making records,’ had come the reply.

‘So, you make an album, and I’ll provide the images,’ Binder had told him.

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Elvis (pictured) had no say in the scripts for films he starred in and was contracted to star in three films a year

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Elvis (pictured) became deeply unhappy during his time working in film and would refer to himself as ‘a joke’ in Hollywood

The conversation moved on to music. Was he open to new styles of songs, Elvis was asked. For instance, would he have sung MacArthur Park, that, at the time, was a very big hit for actor Richard Harris?

‘In a heartbeat,’ Elvis had replied.

The question of Christmas songs wasn’t even discussed. According to Priscilla Presley, who, along with Binder, introduces the cinema version of the show, and who, as the keeper of the flame, is involved in all the Elvis reissues, when the singer got home that night he said to her: ‘I don’t give a goddamn what the Colonel says, I’m going with this guy.’ It was a rare act of defiance against Parker.

After a promising start in the late Fifties with Loving You, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole, movies had become a train to career suicide for Elvis since he’d left the US Army in 1960.

Contracted to make three films a year, he had ‘no say-so in the scripts,’ he would later admit, and had become deeply unhappy. He was, he would admit to friends, ‘a joke’ in Hollywood.

It’s impossible to imagine that Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, other stars of the time, would ever have had no say in what films they appeared in.

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Steve took risks for his Elvis special showing the vocalist sing in brothels and partnering with a black trio singing gospel songs

But they were part of the Hollywood establishment.

Neither Elvis nor Colonel Parker moved socially in movie circles. They didn’t know the top new Hollywood directors, screenwriters or producers. And few of the journeymen directors who had made Elvis’s films, had been in the first flush of youth. Norman Taurog, who directed nine of them, had been born in 1899.

Steve Binder was 35, just a couple of years older than Elvis. The two were a good fit, and with agreement reached, the director sent a couple of writers off to raid the record shops, find Elvis recordings they liked, and then come up with a storyline.

They chose 1967’s Guitar Man, and built around it a narrative of Elvis going through the music that had shaped him.

Once again Binder planned to take risks, showing Elvis singing rhythm and blues in a brothel in one scene (largely cut from the original TV show as being too risqué, but included in the extended cinema version), and then partnered by the black singing trio, The Blossoms, when he sang a medley of the gospel songs with which he’d grown up.

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Elvis (pictured) who sang for the first time with an orchestra for the Christmas special was nervous according to Steve Binder

‘Elvis liked everything we offered him,’ Binder remembers of the singer’s reaction when he was shown the script.

‘The only time I saw him upset about anything, was when a senior producer told him his dyed hair was too black!’

There had been recent problems with his weight and prescription drugs, but, says Binder, ‘he was as clean as a whistle’ for his show. ‘He’d just come back from a holiday in Hawaii and was tanned and looking like a Greek god.’

He was, however, nervous. ‘He’d never sung with an orchestra before and made me promise that if he didn’t like it, I would send the musicians home and just keep the rhythm section.

‘But he loved the sound of the orchestra when he heard it.’

While rehearsals were taking place Binder had the brainwave that would make the show a classic.

Noticing how Elvis would rewind after work by playing and singing with some of his guys in his dressing room, he decided, to make it an improvisational feature of the show.

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Elvis (pictured) was weary about singing in front of an audience at the time he filmed the Christmas special as it had been eight years since he last did it

Whereupon Elvis suggested they send for his original musicians, Scotty Moore and drummer DJ Fontana.

It was, Binder realised, the best way to get the ‘raw’ Elvis, filming him, cinema verité style, with a hand-held camera borrowed from the NBC sports department.

The Colonel wouldn’t allow them to shoot in the dressing room, but finally agreed to a little stage shaped like a boxing ring without the ropes, that was surrounded by fans.

‘It was fly-on-the wall stuff,’ says Priscilla. ‘That was how Elvis was all the time at home, when the boys would come around and start playing and singing together.’

Even so, before he did it for the cameras, Elvis got very nervous. ‘I haven’t been in front of an audience in eight years,’ he told Binder.

‘What am I going to do if they don’t like me? What if they laugh at me?’

As it happened, the exact reverse happened. The jamming session, with Elvis roaming through over a dozen of his favourite old songs, from Lawdy Miss Clawdy and Trying To Get To You to Love and One Night, became the most memorable part of the show.

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Elvis (pictured) began listening to Steve Binder more than his manager ‘Colonel’, Tom Parker during production for his Christmas special

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Elvis’s manager Parker, demanded that a Christmas song be included in the special rather than just original songs by the singer

Not surprisingly, as shooting progressed and Elvis listened more to Binder than to his manager, Parker became increasingly irate that he was being side-tracked.

Calling Binder and Elvis to his office he demanded that at least one Christmas song be included. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it Elvis?’ he said.

Elvis mumbled an embarrassed assent, only to tell Binder once they were alone together. ‘F*** him. We’ll do what we want.’

‘Elvis would never put the Colonel down in front of anyone,’ says Priscilla. ‘That was his way of appeasing him.’

In the end a verse or two of Blue Christmas was added to the improvised medley, but the assassination of Robert Kennedy at the time they were rehearsing ensured that it wouldn’t be a Christmas song that ended the show.

It was just two months after the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis.

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Elvis (pictured) insisted against his manager’s views on including the song If I Can Dream in the Christmas special to show his reaction to the killings happening at the time

Elvis had been in despair over that, ashamed that it should have happened in his home town. Now, with the murder of a second Kennedy, he could talk of nothing else.

Seeing his emotions, Binder asked the show’s music arranger, W. Earl Brown, if he could write something that would reflect how Elvis had reacted to the killings.

The result, written over a weekend, was If I Can Dream, a song about peace, hope and brotherhood that was based directly upon King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.

When Brown played and sang his song to Binder and Parker the manager’s response, was predictably dismissive: ‘That ain’t an Elvis kind of song’, he growled, illustrating his unfamiliarity with the gospel roots of his client.

But then Elvis had his say. ‘We’re doing it,’ he insisted.

‘Steve,’ Elvis said to Binder after the recording, ‘I’m never going to sing another song I don’t believe in.

‘And I’m never going to make another picture I don’t believe in.’

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Binder cut two versions of the Elvis (pictured) TV show, the one hour version he was commissioned to make and another longer edit which is set to air for his anniversary

As it happened, he did record quite a few more songs that he didn’t much care about, but nowhere nearly as many as he had done in his Hollywood years.

As for the movies, there were only a couple more to go, anyway.

With several hours of material to edit, Binder cut two versions of the show, one was the one hour special he’d been commissioned to make, but there was also another much longer edit which he hoped NBC would put out instead.

They chose not to. That is the version that will be shown in the cinemas next week.

Elvis watched the screening of the show on December 3, 1968, sitting in his new Beverly Hills home with Priscilla.

He was very quiet during the transmission, hardly speaking to Priscilla, only for the phones to start ringing and never stop from the moment the end titles appeared. In her opinion it was one of the best things he ever did.

The public liked it, too, with 42 per cent of the American viewing public having watched.

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Steve recalls being at war with Elvis’s manager throughout production for the Christmas special and being unable to continue working together after its completion

The single, If I Can Dream, had been issued a month earlier to lukewarm reaction, but now it raced up the charts, as did the album of the show.

One hour on television had turned Elvis’s life and career around.

More big hits, such as In The Ghetto and Suspicious Minds, soon followed, before the next summer Elvis began doing live shows again, starting in Las Vegas.

Steve Binder was there to see his first night back on stage, but there was never any chance of his working relationship with Elvis continuing.

During the entire production of the TV special he and Colonel Parker had been ‘in a state of war. He wouldn’t let me within a mile of Elvis after that,’ he now laughs.

For him, the strength of the show was in ‘seeing Elvis rediscover himself’. But Elvis didn’t do it alone. As Priscilla would tell Binder. ‘You brought him out of the darkness.’

Elvis: ‘68 Comeback Special will be shown in cinemas nationwide (and worldwide) for one night only on Thursday, 16 August. Tickets available from fathomrocks.com

Elvis: A Lonely Life by Ray Connolly is now available in paperback from Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£9.99)