On 9 February 1964, 73 million Americans tuned in to watch The Beatles make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show . It was a moment that would go down in history as the birth of Beatlemania in the US. But there was another first that night – Ed Sullivan showed the audience.

As the cameras panned in to The Beatles performing “All My Loving”, the broadcast began to cut between the boys on stage and the girls in the crowd. For teenage Beatles fan Amanda Vaill, who was watching on TV at her all-girls’ boarding school, this was a revelation.

“In the auditorium, normally full of people who looked like our parents, we saw ourselves reflected back at us,” she says. “Young women, dressed in proper little wool jumpers, or tidy tailor suits, all gasping and clutching their faces in par

See Full Page