British television Apollo 11 coverage
Encyclopedia
British television coverage of Apollo 11
, man's first mission to land on the moon, lasted from 16 to 24 July 1969 . All the then three UK channels BBC1, BBC2 and ITV
provided extensive coverage. Most of the footage covering this historic event from a British perspective has now been either wiped or lost.
BBC television coverage of man’s first landing on the moon consisted of 27 hours of coverage over a ten day period. The programmes titled Apollo 11 were broadcast from Lime Grove Studios
in London. The BBC2 sections were broadcast in colour and the BBC1 sections in black and white (full colour television in Britain being a few months away). Its main presenter was Cliff Michelmore
, with James Burke
and Patrick Moore
concentrating on scientific and technical explanations and analysis. In America, Michael Charlton reported live from Cape Kennedy and Mission Control in Houston. There had been a big build up to the coverage. The Radio Times
had a cover with a rocket shooting off and the caption “Target Moon”.
The London studio set of Apollo 11 consisted of "a long, angled desk, large models of the moon and the Earth, and a large picture of a rocket against a dark, "cosmic"- type background. On the front of the desk was a digital clock which counted down the time to lift-off etc. Film animations and models of various parts of the spacecraft helped explain certain stages of the journey".
Every day of the mission had broadcasts from the space studio. These would vary between long programmes at important points in the mission, such as launching and undocking. But also shorter progress reports, and special moon-centric contributions to news bulletins, children's television and Twenty-Four Hours, a current affairs show. Programmes in between Apollo 11 reports included But What If It's Made of Green Cheese, an Omnibus
anthology broadcast on the night of the moon landing. Rock group Pink Floyd
were roped in to provide an exclusive instrumental piece called "Moonhead". An audio copy exists of the track and occasionally appears on Pink Floyd bootleg albums. Featured alongside them were distinguished actors of the likes of Ian McKellen
, Judi Dench
, Michael Hordern
and Roy Dotrice
all reading quotes and poetry about the moon. The show also featured Dudley Moore
with The Dudley Moore Trio and jazz singer Marion Montgomery
. David Bowie
's song "Space Oddity" was also featured as part of the coverage.
The actual night of the moon landings on 20/21 July was also historic for British TV, as it was the first ever all-night broadcast on British television, with both BBC1 and ITV remaining on air for 11 hours from 11.30 p.m. (20 July) to 10.30 a.m. (21 July). Neil Armstrong
stepped on to the surface of the moon at 3:56 a.m. British time. His comments were interspersed with commentary from James Burke, often to fill in the silences.
John Godson, who was directing the news that night remembered, "When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface, the whole BBC control room, with the canteen ladies and security guards standing beside the vision control desk, exploded into cheering and clapping. To us it had been a similar type of relief as it must have been to Armstrong, his crew and Ground Control. Up to now, nothing had gone wrong. I vividly recall we had Armstrong's ‘One small step’ spiel with very little distortion, considering he was in full lunar gear. I mean, it was easily comprehensible though, shall we say, slightly garbled. It was quite difficult to make any visual sense out of the first pictures from the lunar surface, as I recollect. But under those circumstances we would have had James Burke describe, voice-over, what we were trying to assimilate with our eyes. I was there to direct the situation - to decide when voice-over explanations were required, to be ready to take actions if the picture circuits failed. In fact, it resulted in quite a calm overnight operation with, if I remember correctly, not a single major panic situation other than numerous sound comprehension problems."
The first images from the moon were upside down, so engineers on Earth operated an electronic switch on receiving the signal to correct the picture. All transmissions from the moon were in black and white. When Buzz Aldrin became the second man on the moon twenty minutes later, the picture quality had improved - after the moon-rise in Australia the signal had moved from the smaller Goldstone
in California to the stronger signal received on the main on-axis receiver of the Parkes
radio-telescope in Australia, and then relayed via the Honeysuckle Creek station to Sydney for subsequent distribution uplink. The BBC later earned a Queen's Award For Industry for the electronic standards converter, which helped translate the pictures from California, via the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station
in Cornwall
to the BBC in London.
For several hours after the live event, pictures of the moonwalk were reshown as edited highlights.
Patrick Moore considers it the most exciting event he ever reported on. He said, "[b]ridging the gap between two worlds was an awesome achievement." James Burke has said in retrospect that it was "[t]he greatest media event of all time". On its tenth anniversary in 1979, he looked back on the whole Apollo programme in two BBC documentaries, The Men Who Walked on the Moon (BBC1) and The Other Side Of The Moon (BBC2, later the same night).
The producer of those documentaries has written a memoir
of BBC TV's Apollo 11 coverage, recalling that the event became a bone of contention between the Science & Features Department, which had covered previous space events, including the Apollo 8 mission, and the Current Affairs Department, which had more appropriate resources for staging very big events.
ITN provided the bulk of the coverage of the Apollo 11 mission for Britain’s then only independent television station. The main front man for the bulletins was Alastair Burnet
, assisted by science correspondent Peter Fairley
and former employee of NASA
, Paul Haney.
On the night of the moonwalk, ITV chose a much lighter tone in covering the event than the BBC. With 16 hours of coverage, in between news bulletins was David Frost
's Moon Party, a discussion and entertainment show made by London Weekend Television
. It featured showbiz personalities such as Peter Cook
, Cilla Black
, Cliff Richard
, Lulu
, Mary Hopkin
, Sammy Davis, Jr.
, Hattie Jacques
and Eric Sykes
. It was said to feature "relevant facts about the moon landing" with "a wealth of outside comment", that according to one commentator "broke up the mood of awesome solemnity that tends to afflict those occasions." The show continued until 3am, and singer Engelbert Humperdinck
, who also featured, was said to have collapsed from exhaustion due to its epic length. The show, transmitted from London Weekend's Wembley Studios, also featured more serious guests, such as Desmond Morris
and Dame Sybil Thorndike. Author Ray Bradbury
objected to what he saw as the frivolous tone of the show, and walked out before he could be interviewed.
Around midnight, a serious discussion on the ethics of the moon landing was held, with historian AJP Taylor and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. "forming a somewhat bizarre alliance in attacking manned space flights." The show continued for longer than expected as the film Down to Earth
was cancelled when NASA had brought forward their schedule by several hours, originally the moonwalk had been planned for 7 a.m. British time.
There was also reactions from the public at Trafalgar Square
and from then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson
, and Peter Sissons
interviewing experts like Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank
.
For the coverage of the moon landing itself, ITV was reliant on computer captions, saying the likes of "Armstrong taking manual control", and "Touchdown, The Eagle has landed". The captions were made by listening to the Houston-Lunar Module talkback, then entering in computer codes, which translated the Eagle's speed and altitude into on-screen information. Paul Haney described the moonwalk on the coverage as "the greatest thing to happen since fish crawled up on the beach and survived." On the landing he remarked the landing was only four miles off the point projected "which is pretty good for Government work". Reminiscing in 1999, ITN producer David Nicholson remembered it as "perhaps the most exciting twelve minutes I’ve ever seen on television. It was a hugely thrilling moment. I remember in the ITN control room there was a gasp from the production staff."
In his diary on 21 July 1969, comedian Michael Palin
wrote "the extraordinary thing about the evening was that, until 3:56 am, when Armstrong clambered out of the spaceship, and activated the keyhole camera, we had seen no space pictures at all, and yet ITV had some how contrived to fill ten hours with a programme devoted to the landing." Comparing the BBC and ITV's takes on the broadcast, Stanley Reynolds in The Guardian
commented: "Perhaps on no other programme have we seen quite so clearly the basic differences between the two television services."
Michael Billington
reviewing in The Times
was much more favourable to the ITV coverage. He said they had "seized the initiative" off the BBC. "In the past it has always been the BBC that has been ready to abandon its schedules to suit historic public events: yesterday, however, the traditional roles were reversed and it was the BBC that persevered with Dr. Finlay's Casebook and The Black and White Minstrel Show
while independent television showed itself far more flexible and enterprising." He praised Frost for the way he "chaired the proceedings with his usual unflappable professionalism" and Burnett for "combining straight news with personal comment", though he said "the combination of news and variety is more debatable. There is certainly something a bit strange about going straight from a discussion about the orbit of Luna 15 to hearing Cilla Black singing her latest recording. On balance, I think this type of juxtaposition is justified, if only because some point of rest is needed in a programme of this length. The danger is that the viewer will be so saturated with information that his responses will be blunted when it comes to the moments of real excitement: pop music, however, provides the necessary let-up and fulfills much the same function as comic relief in a five-act drama.
The footage of the BBC and ITV coverage became victim to the then-broadcasting policy of either erasing videotapes
or simply not keeping them at all. It is not definitely known what happened to these original tapes. This led to rumours that they were taped over almost immediately with horse racing, that the coverage was barely taped at all, or that the tapes fell to bits during digital remastering. All these rumours have since been discounted.
BBC footage known to exist is a mix of fragments kept in the archive and amateur recordings made at the time.
All that are known to exist from the ITV archives are two taped interviews by Peter Sissons
at Jodrell Bank. Footage from Houston while the craft descended onto the moon, showing on-screen data, also exists.
programme Apollo 11, A Night To Remember on 28 February 2006, in which "satellite pictures have been married up with amateur audio recordings, and linked with rarely-seen reports, background films, a couple of rediscovered studio clips, and some new explanatory pieces by Sir Patrick Moore, one of the presenters in 1969."
and Patrick Moore. Lasting 73 minutes, it is based on some four hours of amateur off-air audio recordings by Stephen Sykes. Other off-air recordings are also known to exist.
Apollo 11
In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
, man's first mission to land on the moon, lasted from 16 to 24 July 1969 . All the then three UK channels BBC1, BBC2 and ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
provided extensive coverage. Most of the footage covering this historic event from a British perspective has now been either wiped or lost.
BBC coverage
Lime Grove Studios
Lime Grove Studios was a film studio complex built by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915 situated in a street named Lime Grove, inShepherd's Bush, west London, north of Hammersmith and described by Gaumont as "the finest studio in Great Britain and the first building ever put up in this country...
in London. The BBC2 sections were broadcast in colour and the BBC1 sections in black and white (full colour television in Britain being a few months away). Its main presenter was Cliff Michelmore
Cliff Michelmore
Arthur Clifford "Cliff" Michelmore CBE is a British television presenter and producer. He is best known for the BBC television programme Tonight, which he presented from 1957 to 1965....
, with James Burke
James Burke (science historian)
James Burke is a British broadcaster, science historian, author and television producer known amongst other things for his documentary television series Connections and its more philosophical oriented companion production, The Day the Universe Changed , focusing on the history of science and...
and Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore
Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore, CBE, FRS, FRAS is a British amateur astronomer who has attained prominent status in astronomy as a writer, researcher, radio commentator and television presenter of the subject, and who is credited as having done more than any other person to raise the profile of...
concentrating on scientific and technical explanations and analysis. In America, Michael Charlton reported live from Cape Kennedy and Mission Control in Houston. There had been a big build up to the coverage. The Radio Times
Radio Times
Radio Times is a UK weekly television and radio programme listings magazine, owned by the BBC. It has been published since 1923 by BBC Magazines, which also provides an on-line listings service under the same title...
had a cover with a rocket shooting off and the caption “Target Moon”.
The London studio set of Apollo 11 consisted of "a long, angled desk, large models of the moon and the Earth, and a large picture of a rocket against a dark, "cosmic"- type background. On the front of the desk was a digital clock which counted down the time to lift-off etc. Film animations and models of various parts of the spacecraft helped explain certain stages of the journey".
Every day of the mission had broadcasts from the space studio. These would vary between long programmes at important points in the mission, such as launching and undocking. But also shorter progress reports, and special moon-centric contributions to news bulletins, children's television and Twenty-Four Hours, a current affairs show. Programmes in between Apollo 11 reports included But What If It's Made of Green Cheese, an Omnibus
Omnibus (TV series)
Omnibus was an arts-based BBC television documentary series, broadcast on BBC1 in the United Kingdom. It ran from 1967 until 2003, usually being transmitted on Sunday evenings....
anthology broadcast on the night of the moon landing. Rock group Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
were roped in to provide an exclusive instrumental piece called "Moonhead". An audio copy exists of the track and occasionally appears on Pink Floyd bootleg albums. Featured alongside them were distinguished actors of the likes of Ian McKellen
Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH, CBE is an English actor. He has received a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction...
, Judi Dench
Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia "Judi" Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA is an English film, stage and television actress.Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo...
, Michael Hordern
Michael Hordern
Sir Michael Murray Hordern was an English actor, knighted in 1983 for his services to the theatre, which stretched back to before the Second World War.-Personal life:...
and Roy Dotrice
Roy Dotrice
Roy Dotrice, OBE is a British actor known for his Tony Award-winning Broadway performance in the revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten.-Life and career:...
all reading quotes and poetry about the moon. The show also featured Dudley Moore
Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in the ground-breaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s, and then became famous as half of the highly popular television...
with The Dudley Moore Trio and jazz singer Marion Montgomery
Marion Montgomery
Marion Montgomery was a United States born jazz singer who lived in the United Kingdom.Born Maud Runnells in Natchez, Mississippi, she began her career in Atlanta working clubs, and then in Chicago where singer Peggy Lee heard her on an audition tape and suggested she should be signed up by...
. David Bowie
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
's song "Space Oddity" was also featured as part of the coverage.
The actual night of the moon landings on 20/21 July was also historic for British TV, as it was the first ever all-night broadcast on British television, with both BBC1 and ITV remaining on air for 11 hours from 11.30 p.m. (20 July) to 10.30 a.m. (21 July). Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong
Neil Alden Armstrong is an American former astronaut, test pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor, United States Naval Aviator, and the first person to set foot upon the Moon....
stepped on to the surface of the moon at 3:56 a.m. British time. His comments were interspersed with commentary from James Burke, often to fill in the silences.
John Godson, who was directing the news that night remembered, "When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface, the whole BBC control room, with the canteen ladies and security guards standing beside the vision control desk, exploded into cheering and clapping. To us it had been a similar type of relief as it must have been to Armstrong, his crew and Ground Control. Up to now, nothing had gone wrong. I vividly recall we had Armstrong's ‘One small step’ spiel with very little distortion, considering he was in full lunar gear. I mean, it was easily comprehensible though, shall we say, slightly garbled. It was quite difficult to make any visual sense out of the first pictures from the lunar surface, as I recollect. But under those circumstances we would have had James Burke describe, voice-over, what we were trying to assimilate with our eyes. I was there to direct the situation - to decide when voice-over explanations were required, to be ready to take actions if the picture circuits failed. In fact, it resulted in quite a calm overnight operation with, if I remember correctly, not a single major panic situation other than numerous sound comprehension problems."
The first images from the moon were upside down, so engineers on Earth operated an electronic switch on receiving the signal to correct the picture. All transmissions from the moon were in black and white. When Buzz Aldrin became the second man on the moon twenty minutes later, the picture quality had improved - after the moon-rise in Australia the signal had moved from the smaller Goldstone
Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex
The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex — commonly called the Goldstone Observatory — is located in California's Mojave Desert. Operated by ITT Corporation for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, its main purpose is to track and communicate with space missions. It includes the Pioneer...
in California to the stronger signal received on the main on-axis receiver of the Parkes
Parkes Observatory
The Parkes Observatory is a radio telescope observatory, 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia. It was one of several radio antennas used to receive live, televised images of the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969....
radio-telescope in Australia, and then relayed via the Honeysuckle Creek station to Sydney for subsequent distribution uplink. The BBC later earned a Queen's Award For Industry for the electronic standards converter, which helped translate the pictures from California, via the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station
Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station
Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station is a large telecommunications site located on Goonhilly Downs near Helston on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, England, UK. Owned by BT Group plc, it was at one time the largest satellite earth station in the world, with more than 25 communications dishes in use...
in Cornwall
Cornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...
to the BBC in London.
For several hours after the live event, pictures of the moonwalk were reshown as edited highlights.
Patrick Moore considers it the most exciting event he ever reported on. He said, "[b]ridging the gap between two worlds was an awesome achievement." James Burke has said in retrospect that it was "[t]he greatest media event of all time". On its tenth anniversary in 1979, he looked back on the whole Apollo programme in two BBC documentaries, The Men Who Walked on the Moon (BBC1) and The Other Side Of The Moon (BBC2, later the same night).
The producer of those documentaries has written a memoir
of BBC TV's Apollo 11 coverage, recalling that the event became a bone of contention between the Science & Features Department, which had covered previous space events, including the Apollo 8 mission, and the Current Affairs Department, which had more appropriate resources for staging very big events.
ITV coverage
Alastair Burnet
Sir Alastair Burnet is a British journalist and broadcaster, known for his work in news and current affairs programmes.- Early life :...
, assisted by science correspondent Peter Fairley
Peter Fairley
Peter Fairley was a science journalist who was the Science Editor for Independent Television News and TV Times magazine the late sixties and early seventies.His name became synonymous with ITN's extensive live coverage of the Apollo moon landing missions.- Biography :His father was a...
and former employee of NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
, Paul Haney.
On the night of the moonwalk, ITV chose a much lighter tone in covering the event than the BBC. With 16 hours of coverage, in between news bulletins was David Frost
David Frost
Sir David Frost is a British broadcaster.David Frost may also refer to:*David Frost , South African golfer*David Frost , classical record producer*David Frost *Dave Frost, baseball pitcher...
's Moon Party, a discussion and entertainment show made by London Weekend Television
London Weekend Television
London Weekend Television was the name of the ITV network franchise holder for Greater London and the Home Counties including south Suffolk, middle and east Hampshire, Oxfordshire, south Bedfordshire, south Northamptonshire, parts of Herefordshire & Worcestershire, Warwickshire, east Dorset and...
. It featured showbiz personalities such as Peter Cook
Peter Cook
Peter Edward Cook was an English satirist, writer and comedian. An extremely influential figure in modern British comedy, he is regarded as the leading light of the British satire boom of the 1960s. He has been described by Stephen Fry as "the funniest man who ever drew breath," although Cook's...
, Cilla Black
Cilla Black
Cilla Black OBE is an English singer, actress, entertainer and media personality, who has been consistently popular as a light entertainment figure since 1963. She is most famous for her singles Anyone Who Had A Heart, You're My World, and Alfie...
, Cliff Richard
Cliff Richard
Sir Cliff Richard, OBE is a British pop singer, musician, performer, actor, and philanthropist who has sold over an estimated 250 million records worldwide....
, Lulu
Lulu (singer)
Lulu Kennedy-Cairns, OBE , best known by her stage name Lulu, is a Scottish singer, actress, and television personality who has been successful in the entertainment business from the 1960s through to the present day...
, Mary Hopkin
Mary Hopkin
Mary Hopkin , credited on some recordings as Mary Visconti, is a Welsh folk singer best known for her 1968 UK number one single "Those Were The Days". She was one of the first musicians to sign to The Beatles' Apple label....
, Sammy Davis, Jr.
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Samuel George "Sammy" Davis Jr. was an American entertainer and was also known for his impersonations of actors and other celebrities....
, Hattie Jacques
Hattie Jacques
Josephine Edwina Jaques was an English comedy actress, known as Hattie Jacques.Starting her career in the 1940s, Jacques first gained attention through her radio appearances with Tommy Handley on ITMA and later with Tony Hancock on Hancock's Half Hour...
and Eric Sykes
Eric Sykes
Eric Sykes, CBE is an English radio, television and film writer, actor and director whose performing career has spanned more than 50 years. He frequently wrote for and/or performed with many other leading comedy performers and writers of the period, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Peter...
. It was said to feature "relevant facts about the moon landing" with "a wealth of outside comment", that according to one commentator "broke up the mood of awesome solemnity that tends to afflict those occasions." The show continued until 3am, and singer Engelbert Humperdinck
Engelbert Humperdinck (singer)
Engelbert Humperdinck is a British pop singer, best known for his hits including "Release Me " and "After the Lovin'" as well as "The Last Waltz" .-Early life:...
, who also featured, was said to have collapsed from exhaustion due to its epic length. The show, transmitted from London Weekend's Wembley Studios, also featured more serious guests, such as Desmond Morris
Desmond Morris
Desmond John Morris, born 24 January 1928 in Purton, north Wiltshire, is a British zoologist and ethologist, as well as a popular anthropologist. He is also known as a painter, television presenter and popular author.-Life:...
and Dame Sybil Thorndike. Author Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
objected to what he saw as the frivolous tone of the show, and walked out before he could be interviewed.
Around midnight, a serious discussion on the ethics of the moon landing was held, with historian AJP Taylor and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. "forming a somewhat bizarre alliance in attacking manned space flights." The show continued for longer than expected as the film Down to Earth
Down to Earth (1947 film)
Down to Earth is a musical comedy starring Rita Hayworth, Larry Parks, and Marc Platt, and directed by Alexander Hall. It is a sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan, also directed by Hall. Edward Everett Horton and James Gleason reprise their roles from the earlier film, but Roland Culver...
was cancelled when NASA had brought forward their schedule by several hours, originally the moonwalk had been planned for 7 a.m. British time.
There was also reactions from the public at Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square is a public space and tourist attraction in central London, England, United Kingdom. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. There are a number of statues and sculptures in the square, with one plinth displaying changing pieces of...
and from then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC was a British Labour Member of Parliament, Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the...
, and Peter Sissons
Peter Sissons
Peter George Sissons is a broadcast journalist in the United Kingdom. He was the presenter of the BBC Nine O'Clock News and the BBC News at Ten between 1993 and 2003, as earlier a newscaster for ITN, providing bulletins on ITV and Channel 4. He is also a former presenter of the BBC's Question Time...
interviewing experts like Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank
Jodrell Bank
The Jodrell Bank Observatory is a British observatory that hosts a number of radio telescopes, and is part of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester...
.
For the coverage of the moon landing itself, ITV was reliant on computer captions, saying the likes of "Armstrong taking manual control", and "Touchdown, The Eagle has landed". The captions were made by listening to the Houston-Lunar Module talkback, then entering in computer codes, which translated the Eagle's speed and altitude into on-screen information. Paul Haney described the moonwalk on the coverage as "the greatest thing to happen since fish crawled up on the beach and survived." On the landing he remarked the landing was only four miles off the point projected "which is pretty good for Government work". Reminiscing in 1999, ITN producer David Nicholson remembered it as "perhaps the most exciting twelve minutes I’ve ever seen on television. It was a hugely thrilling moment. I remember in the ITN control room there was a gasp from the production staff."
In his diary on 21 July 1969, comedian Michael Palin
Michael Palin
Michael Edward Palin, CBE FRGS is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries....
wrote "the extraordinary thing about the evening was that, until 3:56 am, when Armstrong clambered out of the spaceship, and activated the keyhole camera, we had seen no space pictures at all, and yet ITV had some how contrived to fill ten hours with a programme devoted to the landing." Comparing the BBC and ITV's takes on the broadcast, Stanley Reynolds in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
commented: "Perhaps on no other programme have we seen quite so clearly the basic differences between the two television services."
Michael Billington
Michael Billington (critic)
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. Drama critic of The Guardian since October 1971, he is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts; most notably, he is the authorised...
reviewing in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
was much more favourable to the ITV coverage. He said they had "seized the initiative" off the BBC. "In the past it has always been the BBC that has been ready to abandon its schedules to suit historic public events: yesterday, however, the traditional roles were reversed and it was the BBC that persevered with Dr. Finlay's Casebook and The Black and White Minstrel Show
The Black and White Minstrel Show
The Black and White Minstrel Show was a British light entertainment show that ran on BBC television from 1958-1978 and was a popular stage show. It was a weekly light entertainment and variety show presenting traditional American minstrel and Country songs, as well as show and music hall numbers,...
while independent television showed itself far more flexible and enterprising." He praised Frost for the way he "chaired the proceedings with his usual unflappable professionalism" and Burnett for "combining straight news with personal comment", though he said "the combination of news and variety is more debatable. There is certainly something a bit strange about going straight from a discussion about the orbit of Luna 15 to hearing Cilla Black singing her latest recording. On balance, I think this type of juxtaposition is justified, if only because some point of rest is needed in a programme of this length. The danger is that the viewer will be so saturated with information that his responses will be blunted when it comes to the moments of real excitement: pop music, however, provides the necessary let-up and fulfills much the same function as comic relief in a five-act drama.
Missing/existing footage
Wiping
Wiping or junking is a colloquial term for action taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies, in which old audiotapes, videotapes, and telerecordings , are erased, reused, or destroyed after several uses...
or simply not keeping them at all. It is not definitely known what happened to these original tapes. This led to rumours that they were taped over almost immediately with horse racing, that the coverage was barely taped at all, or that the tapes fell to bits during digital remastering. All these rumours have since been discounted.
BBC footage known to exist is a mix of fragments kept in the archive and amateur recordings made at the time.
- One minute of footage showing James Burke reviewing the Apollo 11 launch on 16 July 1969, on the programme Twenty-Four Hours.
- Various filmed inserts presented by James Burke, featuring him inside the Apollo Command Module, demonstrating Apollo Saturn emergency precautions, demonstrating the Lunar EVAExtra-vehicular activityExtra-vehicular activity is work done by an astronaut away from the Earth, and outside of a spacecraft. The term most commonly applies to an EVA made outside a craft orbiting Earth , but also applies to an EVA made on the surface of the Moon...
suit and explaining weightlessness training. - Some BBC News bulletins by Reg Turnill (not part of the live coverage).
- In autumn 2000, an amateur video recording was found of the event. It was found to be unplayable, but there is hope one day that some visual material may be salvageable.
- In 2003 a few tele-recorded clips were discovered.
- A 20-second video fragment of Patrick MoorePatrick MooreSir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore, CBE, FRS, FRAS is a British amateur astronomer who has attained prominent status in astronomy as a writer, researcher, radio commentator and television presenter of the subject, and who is credited as having done more than any other person to raise the profile of...
and James BurkeJames Burke (science historian)James Burke is a British broadcaster, science historian, author and television producer known amongst other things for his documentary television series Connections and its more philosophical oriented companion production, The Day the Universe Changed , focusing on the history of science and...
presenting in the BBC studio on 20 June 1969, recovered from an amateur homemade recording. - 8 mm8 mm film8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the filmstrip is eight millimeters wide. It exists in two main versions: the original standard 8mm film, also known as regular 8 mm or Double 8 mm, and Super 8...
home movie footage shot of a TV screen, showing some captions superimposed over pictures from Mission Control (although this has not been positively identified as BBC footage).
All that are known to exist from the ITV archives are two taped interviews by Peter Sissons
Peter Sissons
Peter George Sissons is a broadcast journalist in the United Kingdom. He was the presenter of the BBC Nine O'Clock News and the BBC News at Ten between 1993 and 2003, as earlier a newscaster for ITN, providing bulletins on ITV and Channel 4. He is also a former presenter of the BBC's Question Time...
at Jodrell Bank. Footage from Houston while the craft descended onto the moon, showing on-screen data, also exists.
BBC4 reconstruction
The entire evening of the BBC’s coverage was reconstructed on the BBC FourBBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
programme Apollo 11, A Night To Remember on 28 February 2006, in which "satellite pictures have been married up with amateur audio recordings, and linked with rarely-seen reports, background films, a couple of rediscovered studio clips, and some new explanatory pieces by Sir Patrick Moore, one of the presenters in 1969."
Soundtrack CD release
On 20 September 1994 a CD was released by Pearl entitled Apollo 11 Moon Landing: The BBC Television Broadcasts July 16–24, 1969. It contains extracts from the BBC television coverage of the historic first moon landing, with additional retrospective views by Arthur C. ClarkeArthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
and Patrick Moore. Lasting 73 minutes, it is based on some four hours of amateur off-air audio recordings by Stephen Sykes. Other off-air recordings are also known to exist.
Track listing
- "Apollo + 25" – Arthur C. Clarke
- "Speech By President John F. Kennedy (May 1961)"
- "A Million People Have Made Their Way Down to the Cape"
- "30 Billion Dollars for the Apollo Programme"
- "This Is Apollo Saturn Launch Control"
- "And All Eyes Looking Upwards"
- "3 Minutes 45 Seconds And Counting"
- "600 Million People This Afternoon Watched the Apollo 11"
- "We're Now in the Approach Phase"
- "Hatch Reported Coming Open"
- "Armstrong About to Release TV Camera"
- "About to Pick Up the "Contingency Sample" of Moon Rock"
- "Making Sure Not to Lock It on the Way Out"
- "Neil Is Now Unveiling the Plaque"
- "Armstrong and Aldrin Talk to President Richard Nixon"
- "Houston Communicates with Michael Collins"
- "Armstrong and Aldrin Talk from Surface"
- "With 3 Minutes Dead Go to the Lift Off"
- "Lift Off"
- "One Minute to Orbit Insertion"
- "It's Down Below 23,000 Feet Now"
- "Command Module Is Stable 2"
- "Recovery 1 Is on Station"
- "On Board USS Hornet"
- "Final Thoughts" – Patrick Moore