Although the performance at Shea Stadium last night (50 years ago) was not the Beatle's first North American tour, interest in it remained very high back home in Britain. And the promise of a world-record audience at Shea Stadium added extra glitter to the package. The BBC Transcription Service therefore negotiated with Brian Epstein that its regular programme host Brian Matthew - also, incidentally, a business associate of Epstein's - should be allowed to join the group's entourage for a part of the tour, until August 20th, recording interviews with the Beatles, compiling a documentary of the momemtous events and filing a number of reports back to the BBC in London. (Matthew's other task during the trip was to plug the Transcription Service's weekly radio show Top Of The Pops - not confused with the entirely different BBC TV series of the same name - and he made many personal appearances on US Radio doing just this.)
Matthew's first report, an on-the-spot account of the Shea concert, went into both editions of the next morning's (August 16th) edition of the Home Service news-magazine programme Today, and another went into the Light Programme's Roundabout '65 during the same afternoon.
