Our World (1967 TV program)

• 1. Introduction

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  On Sunday the 25th of June 1967, somewhere between 400 and 700 million people watched the same television broadcast at the same moment. That number made Our World the largest television audience ever assembled up to that point in history. The show ran two hours, crossed every inhabited continent, and used four satellites to stitch the planet together in real time. It asked a deceptively simple question: what does the world look like, right now, all at once? The answers it found ranged from hospital delivery rooms to a quasar at the edge of the known universe. And somewhere in the middle, in a recording studio on Abbey Road in London, the Beatles performed a song nobody had ever heard before.

• 2. Building the Machine

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  BBC producer Aubrey Singer conceived the project, but the sheer scale of it quickly outgrew any single broadcaster. Coordination passed to the European Broadcasting Union, with Singer staying on as head of the production. What followed was ten months of planning involving ten thousand technicians, producers and performers across dozens of countries.

  Four geosynchronous satellites carried the signal around the globe. Intelsat I, known as Early Bird, and Intelsat II F-3, known as Canary Bird, sat over different portions of the Atlantic. Intelsat II F-2, known as Lani Bird, and NASA's ATS-1 covered the Pacific. Nine ground stations sent and received signals from those satellites, while forty-three control rooms linked North America, Europe, Tunisia, Japan and Australia in real time.

  The master control room was the TC1 studio control room at BBC Television Centre in London. Contributions from North America, Japan and Australia were routed there through the CBS Switching Center in New York, which was rented because none of the three major American broadcast networks was directly involved. Continental European and Tunisian contributions arrived via the EBU Centre in Brussels.

  To bridge the language divide, each receiving broadcaster supplied its own narrator reading a script written by Antony Jay. A team of interpreters at BBC's TC2 studio provided simultaneous translation into English, French and German, allowing local commentators everywhere else to voice over in their own language. The ground rules were firm: no politicians or heads of state, no pre-recorded material, and no segment included for geographical or political reasons rather than program balance.

• 3. Who Was There and Who Was Not

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  Fourteen national broadcasters ultimately participated, transmitting live to twenty-four countries. Originally eighteen had been planned to take part. Five withdrew just four days before broadcast: the broadcasters of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union pulled out in protest over Western nations' response to the Six-Day War. Their departure forced the removal of an entire scheduled section called The Hungry World. Its remaining segments were folded into a different section, The Crowded World.

  To partially fill the gap, a request went to Denmark's broadcaster, Danmarks Radio, which had not originally been part of the production at all. Denmark agreed and contributed a segment.

  The dress rehearsal the day before the broadcast revealed a separate problem. The Mexican broadcaster, Telesistema Mexicano, had pre-recorded its main segment in violation of the live-only rule. The segment featured singers, dancers and a flock of white doves taking off precisely on cue. Replicating that scene for the actual broadcast was impossible. The production team resolved it by showing some of the performers watching their own taped segment live on monitors during the broadcast itself.

  Among the broadcasters who participated were Australia's ABC, Canada's CBC/SRC, France's ORTF, Italy's RAI, Japan's NHK, Spain's TVE, Sweden's SRT, Tunisia's RTT, the United Kingdom's BBC, the United States' National Educational Television, and West Germany's ARD, among others.

• 4. A Journey Around the Planet

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  The Vienna Philharmonic played the Our World theme over the opening credits, sung in seventeen different languages by the Vienna Boys' Choir. The broadcast proper began with live images from hospital delivery rooms in four countries: Hokkaido University Hospital in Sapporo, Japan; Aarhus University Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark; Hospital de Obstetricia III in Mexico City; and Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, Canada.

  From there the program traveled: to the United Austrian Iron and Steelworks in Linz; over the weekend traffic at Porte de la Chapelle in Paris aboard a Protection Civile helicopter; to the monuments of Medina in Tunis; and to fishing vessels working the Gulf of Cadiz off Spain. At 7:17 p.m. GMT the show cut to Glassboro, New Jersey, where American president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin were meeting for the Glassboro Summit Conference. Because no politician could appear on screen, only the exterior of the Hollybush Mansion was shown, with National Educational Television's Dick McCutcheon speaking instead about what the new satellite technology meant for global communication.

  At 7:20 p.m. GMT the program moved to Tokyo, where it was already 4:20 a.m. the following morning. NHK showed workers building a section of the Tokyo subway system. The switch to Australia at 7:22 p.m. GMT was the broadcast's most technically demanding moment. Kashima Ground Station in Japan had to shift from transmit mode to receive mode, while Cooby Creek Tracking Station in Australia had to reverse from receive to transmit. The Australian segment came from Melbourne, where ABC's Brian King reported on trams leaving the South Melbourne tram depot in the middle of winter, with sunrise still hours away.

  The section called Aspiration to Physical Excellence brought swimmer Elaine Tanner to Empire Pool in Vancouver, attempting to break the 110-yard butterfly world record. Riders Piero D'Inzeo and Raimondo D'Inzeo appeared at the Equestrian Circle in Castellazzo di Bollate, Italy. Canoeists Gert Fredriksson, Gunnar Utterberg, Lars Andersson and Rolf Pettersson appeared in Soderfors, Sweden. The section closed in Marseille, France, with the maiden voyage of the Telescaphe, described as the world's first underwater cable car.

• 5. Art at the Edge of the World

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  Film director Franco Zeffirelli appeared at San Pietro church in Tuscania, Italy, rehearsing his film Romeo and Juliet with actors Milo O'Shea, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. From there the program moved to Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, West Germany, for rehearsals of the opera Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival, featuring director Wolfgang Wagner, conductor Rudolf Kempe and singers Heather Harper and Grace Hoffman.

  At Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, sculptor Alexander Calder and painter Joan Miro appeared together. In Mexico City, Antonio Aguilar sang "Alla en el Rancho Grande" on horseback, and Flor Silvestre sang "Como Mexico no hay dos." At the Lincoln Center in New York City, conductor Leonard Bernstein and pianist Van Cliburn rehearsed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3.

  The final artistic segment came from EMI Recording Studio 1 at Abbey Road in London. Introduced by Steve Race, the Beatles performed "All You Need Is Love" for the first time. The broadcast took place at the height of the Vietnam War, and the band had been asked to write something with a positive message. They filled the studio with friends to create a festive atmosphere, including members of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon and Graham Nash, who joined in on the chorus.

  The broadcast went out in black and white. Nearly three decades later, for the 1995 television special The Beatles Anthology, that segment was colourised using colour photographs taken at the event as a reference. The sequence begins in its original monochromatic format and shifts into full colour, showing the flower power and psychedelic clothing worn by the Beatles and their guests during what came to be called the Summer of Love.

• 6. Beyond the Horizon

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  The final section of Our World, called The World Beyond, looked outward from Earth. It opened at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Kennedy and then traveled to Parkes Observatory in Parkes, Australia, where astronomer John Gatenby Bolton was tracking quasar 0237-23, which was at that time the most distant known object in the universe. The segment was reported by Kim Corcoran. The broadcast then returned to BBC's TC1 studio in London for a closing segment that wove together live footage from several of the locations already visited during the two hours.

  Philosopher Marshall McLuhan had appeared earlier in the program, interviewed at a television control room in Toronto for the Canadian contribution, speaking to the implications of a world watching itself in real time. That idea found a long echo: in the 2000 novel The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, a character named Hiram Patterson builds a global media empire called OurWorld, the name chosen because he had watched the 1967 broadcast as a child and been moved to change the world.

  A permanent exhibition about the broadcast opened at London's Science Museum in 2018, drawing on footage from the show itself and video interviews with surviving members of the production team. The quasar Bolton tracked from Parkes that night, 0237-23, was already ancient light by the time it reached the dish. Bolton noted its coordinates, the cameras rolled, and for a moment the largest television audience ever assembled watched the edge of the known universe together.