Innholdsfortegnelse for The Beatles on TV i TV Guide Magazine

Would there even have been Beatlemania without The Ed Sullivan Show? The answer is yes. The Beatles were destined for immortality, and their Fab Four reputation preceded their spectacular debut on the American airwaves. But the power of TV in the mid-1960s, when we were still captive audiences, combined with the electrifying appeal of those young lads from Liverpool with their mop tops and infectious swagger, secured their place in music history. Who can forget the image of those screaming, crying teenyboppers pouring out all their loving and nearly drowning out the harmonies and beats of John and Paul and George and Ringo? And that was just their first act. The Beatles were the tip of the spear of the British Invasion, influential both then and now. I still remember…

ROUGH AND READY: That’s what the Beatles were when Britain’s Granada TV first captured them in 1962 at the Cavern Club for an appearance that never aired. (It was deemed too grainy.) In the years that followed, they set styles, created the template for MTV (winning the Video Vanguard Moonman at the network’s inaugural Video Music Awards) and grew with the medium. Here are their reflections on those early television days, captured in the 2000 Beatles Anthology book and various other sources. Granada TV special, 1962 George Harrison: It was really hot, and we were asked to dress up properly. We had shirts and ties and little black pullovers. So we looked quite smart. It was our first television appearance. It was big time, a TV-company-coming-to-film-us excitement. Sunday Night at…

1 Yesterday Year: 1965 Album: Help! DIRECTOR: TIM KILEY STYLE POINTS After a brief introduction from George Harrison (as the audience’s screams fade for a moment), Paul McCartney performs a close-up, solo acoustic version of his poignant song, smiling occasionally through the renewed screams. Let’s call it one of the earliest-ever videos in the simple filmed-performance style. FUN FACT “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs.” Not quite as meaningful, lyrically, as the opening lines of “Yesterday,” but those were the nonsensical words Paul tossed in to remember the melodic phrasing once the tune first came to him. As to his performance of the song on the Sullivan show, Paul later recalled, “I had to do ‘Yesterday’ on my own; I’d always had the band with me. So…

Grammy Award–winning musician Billy Joel: [After seeing the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964] That one performance changed my life.… I’d never considered playing rock [music] as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn’t look like they’d come out of the Hollywood star mill…and especially because you could see this look in John Lennon’s face—and he looked like he was always saying, “F---you!” I said, “I know these guys, I can relate to these guys, I am these guys. This is what I’m going to do—play in a rock band.” Sting, lead singer, the Police: The Beatles were formative in my upbringing, my education. They came from a very similar background: the industrial towns in England, working class. They wrote their own…

1 Royal Variety Performance Prince of Wales Theatre, London, Nov. 4, 1963 BROADCAST IN THE U.K. ON ITV, NOV. 10, 1963 THE BIG PICTURE The Beatles enter the British mainstream by rocking—and not rattling—the royals. BEHIND THE SCENES By late 1963, Beatlemania had captivated the young British faithful thanks to a string of hits from the band’s debut album, Please Please Me. Their concerts were drowned out by screaming fans, but to the general public they were, potentially, still a fad four. A golden opportunity came when John, Paul, George and Ringo were invited to perform at the annual fundraiser for the Royal Variety Charity, a show always attended by members of the royal family and seen as the biggest night in British show business. Also on the slate that…

It seems we are forever looking back at the Beatles. Their music still feels relevant and their influence is obvious, yet they remain a fixture of our past, starting with that explosive first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, when tens of millions of viewers were shocked and awed by the songs and the screams. But TV GUIDE MAGAZINE has always maintained an advantage: We were there, watching the action as it took place. Later on, as the many stories on these pages prove, we celebrated the band’s ability to electrify. But it was the first encounter that really sold us. As our overseas reporter Robert Musel enthused in the April 18, 1964, issue, “I write this dispatch from the front lines, having just been buffetted,…

Across the Universe PRIME VIDEO Directed by Broadway veteran Julie Taymor (The Lion King), this 2007 rock musical fantasia employs 33 of the Beatles’ most indelible songs to take audiences on a magical mystery tour through the turbulent 1960s. Most of the cult favorite’s character names come from Beatles lyrics: Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), an upper-class suburban transplant in New York, falls into a star-crossed love affair with Jude (Jim Sturgess), a former Liverpool ship welder. Her brother Max (Joe Anderson) is a rebellious college student who is later drafted. The boundary-breaking film boasts a feast of ecstatic, hallucinatory music sequences, including an Uncle Sam poster coming to animated life, bleeding strawberries—and even Army recruits carrying the Statue of Liberty across a Vietnamese jungle in their underwear. The Beatles: A…