Book review: The Beatles on Television

When I ordered this book, I mistakenly took it as an account of the Beatles television appearances. I got it in the mail the other day and discovered it was actually a photo book. Filled with photos of the Beatles in TV studios, the book was a delight to look through, but it did concentrate on a few of their TV appearances and totally ignoring most. Oh well, these are probably the ones they had most photos from. There are lots of photos from the Fab Four’s appearance on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium from October 13th, 1963. And that’s cool, because the photos are the only surviving documentation of that telecast. The tape has long gone. But here it is, in colour and in black and white, on stage and off stage.

Even the blurry ones that were dismissed at the time are now being published.

Here’s a nice one from the rehearsals for “Thank Your Lucky Stars” in 1965.

Rehearsals and recording the Morecambe and Wise Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, Ready Steady Go, Around The Beatles, De Beatles in Nederland with Jimmy Nicol, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Blackpool Night Out, Circus Krone-Bau in Munich, Our World (the press call and TV Show), Magical Mystery Tour (mainly in b/w), and it finishes with a couple of b/w shots from John and Paul’s appearance on the Tonight Show, May 14th, 1968. All in all 178 pages, and most of the photos are rather large.