It was one of the greatest rock’n’roll comebacks, and also one of the biggest television events in history, watched by nearly half of America’s viewing population.

Now, 50 years on, Elvis Presley’s famed 1968 TV concert is getting a big-screen reboot, showing at 250 cinemas throughout Britain next week. A new generation of fans will be able to watch the king, dressed head to toe in black leather and curling that famous upper lip, swagger his way through one of the best performances of his career. “It feels like only yesterday to me,” Steve Binder, 85, the show’s director, told the Observer. “Elvis went out on that stage cold. He hadn’t performed in eight years, and he’d had few hit records in that time. But he just went out there and did it. That was raw talent.”

The concert, in which Presley reeled off hit after hit, from Heartbreak Hotel to Love Me Tender, came at a crossroads in his career. Written off by many in the industry, he had been in what Binder described as “a creative exile”, making Hollywood movies under the notoriously authoritarian management of Colonel Tom Parker. “The colonel was all about power and his will over others,” Binder said.

Parker had wanted NBC to finance Elvis’s next film, which the network agreed to – but only on condition he performed a Christmas TV special. Binder – who had shot to fame in the 60s, working with Petula Clark, Diana Ross and the Rolling Stones – says that when Elvis was told about the TV contract, he refused to do it. “He kept saying to me, ‘Television ain’t my turf, Steve.’”

“So I said, ‘Well, what is your turf?’. He said, ‘Making an album’. So I said, ‘Well, you make an album and I’ll put pictures to it’,” Binder said.

He told Elvis not to worry about cameras or lights or hitting marks. “Just do your thing, I said.”

Elvis was nervous before going on stage at NBC’s California studios. But he didn’t disappoint,impressing with an improvised segment that turned the appearance into a pivotal moment in rock’n’roll history.

It was filmed using handheld cameras, the first time the technology had been used outside sports, and shot in 360 degrees to capture his body language. It was the acoustic set that helped Elvis rediscover himself, Binder said: “I almost had to get a hook to pull him off the stage, he was having such a good time.”

And a year later, he had his first US No 1 in seven years with Suspicious Minds.

Binder had flown in Elvis’s old stalwarts, drummer DJ Fontana (who beat his sticks on a guitar case rather than a drum kit) and guitarist Scotty Moore.

Elvis is seen joking and goofing around between numbers with his old buddies – it was a far cry from the scripted sets he was used to performing under Parker’s management, Binder said.

Elvis asked: Do you think it would be possible to put a bed in my dressing room?

But it really only happened by accident: “When I took Elvis out to NBC to show him where we were actually going to shoot the show, he said, ‘Do you think it would be possible to put a bed in my dressing room?’”

It was a bizarre request from a man who could afford the best hotel suites in town but Binder agreed to it.

“That was the greatest thing that ever happened because after we’d finished rehearsing or taping he’d go into this dressing room bedroom and jam until 2 o’clock in the morning.

“He’d do songs I’d never heard before, and I thought, this is gold, I have to get a camera into this dressing room.” The colonel vetoed it immediately.

Binder had already rubbed up Parker the wrong way by refusing to do a Christmas-themed show, so the only chance of capturing the dressing room mood was to re-create it on stage.

“But then Elvis said, ‘Steve, I don’t remember anything I did in the dressing room. I don’t remember any of the songs, I don’t remember any of the stories!’

“So I just grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down from memory what he’d done, and he took that paper on stage and actually referred to it even through eight bars of MacArthur Park!”

Binder looks back now and realises it was the first real “unplugged” moment on TV.

Although the show’s soundtrack album went platinum, Parker remained furious with Binder.

“I was persona non grata, the colonel wouldn’t let me get within 100 yards of him”, Binder said.

Binder travelled to Las Vegas to watch Elvis play live on two more occasions, once in 1969 when “he was fabulous”, Binder says, and a year later when he knew “it was all over”.

Elvis had put on weight and was using tranquillisers and amphetamines. Less than nine years after the TV show aired, he died, aged 42.

“The last time I saw him, he told me he was never going to sing a song he didn’t believe in again, he was never going to do a movie he didn’t like. I said, I hear you Elvis but I’m not sure you’re strong enough to stand up to the colonel,” Binder says.

“I always felt he died of boredom in Vegas rather than drugs,”

Elvis Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special is in cinemas on 16 August