The Unsleeping Eye is a Yorkshire Television documentary, focusing on the RAF Fylingdales site in the North Yorkshire Moors, near Whitby. Yorkshire Television started life in 1968 in Leeds and was one of the forerunners of broadcasting technology at this time; the studios were one of the first of its kind in Europe as it was the first purpose-built colour studio. In 1997, Granada (now ITV) acquired Yorkshire Television, and in 2002 it was renamed to ITV Yorkshire. The station produced...

The Unsleeping Eye is a Yorkshire Television documentary, focusing on the RAF Fylingdales site in the North Yorkshire Moors, near Whitby. Yorkshire Television started life in 1968 in Leeds and was one of the forerunners of broadcasting technology at this time; the studios were one of the first of its kind in Europe as it was the first purpose-built colour studio. In 1997, Granada (now ITV) acquired Yorkshire Television, and in 2002 it was renamed to ITV Yorkshire. The station produced programming that touched on lots of different genres, including comedy, children’s, game shows, and regional documentaries like The Unsleeping Eye. The station often broke new ground; it was the first to offer breakfast television which had the familiar format of a news bulletin followed by children’s cartoons. In 1986, they were the first station to broadcast a 24-hour transmission; at first a music programme was used, later, an early version of the Teletext service.

The first regular television broadcasting was launched by the BBC in 1936; following the invention of the television set by John Logie Baird in 1926. The BBC at first transmitted just four hours of programming each day, and was only available to people living in London. In May 1937, King George VI’s coronation procession was television’s first outside broadcast and the Wimbledon tennis championships was the first televised sporting event in Britain. Television broadcasting was put on hold two days before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, as the government was concerned that the signals given off in the process would attract enemy bombers. Television broadcasting resumed as normal after the end of WWII, but the BBC had a monopoly on broadcasting in the UK and television’s audience was still relatively small. The television act of 1954 allowed for the creation of commercial television and thus, ITV and its regional sub-sections were created and the potential audience was increased.

The film explores the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, RAF Fylingdales, based in the North York Moors. The site became fully operational in 1963, and was designed and partly funded by the USA along with two other sites in Alaska and Greenland in order to have the radar coverage necessary to identify any incoming hostile objects. The soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 demonstrated that the Soviet Union had the technological capability to launch a missile attack on the west and this unsurprisingly caused a lot of anxiety for the British public. The aim of RAF Fylingdales was to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that Britain and America had the technological capabilities to detect an enemy missile, and that this would deter the Soviet Union from launching an attack in the first place. This strategy is known as peace through deterrence.

Fortunately, the only times a nuclear bomb has ever been used as warfare was on 6th August 1945 and again on 9th August, when the USA dropped the “little boy” and the “fat man” on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed in these blasts and many more died of radiation sickness and cancer in the years and decades afterward; the rate of birth defects was higher for those exposed to radiation too. The effects of these two bombs were utterly horrifying and devastating, forcing many to question the morality of US president Harry S. Truman’s decision to bomb Japan. When the news of these attacks reached Britain, it sparked a post-war anxiety which was exacerbated by the growing threat of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union in the 1950s through to the 1980s. The Soviet Union, war allies after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, fell out with the allies toward the end of the Second World War.

With Nazi Germany defeated, the Soviet Union and Allies no longer had a common enemy to unite against. The Soviet Union possessed a huge amount of troops in the Red Army, but Stalin was jealous that America had a technologically superior arsenal which caused further tension still. Winston Churchill referred to the Soviet Union’s growing sphere of influence and made famous the phrase “iron curtain” (originally used by the Nazis) to describe the separation between the USSR’s sphere of influence in the east, and Western Europe. Once the Soviet Union developed their own Atom bomb in 1949, the threat of nuclear war became very real and fear gripped both America and Britain for the next few decades.

The presence of RAF Fylingdales was not free from controversy; in the film a “peace camp” has been set up opposite the entrance to the base and there are members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) peacefully protesting. The CND was first launched in 1958 as response to the growing fear of nuclear war that had started to dominate the country. Concerns began to develop about the health and environmental effects of nuclear weaponry as well, giving the British public all the more reason to favour nuclear disarmament. The unique aspect of the CND demonstrations was that they consisted of a wide variety of protestors – a true cross-section of British society united over one common goal.   There is more on this in the context for Civil Unrest at Armthorpe.

References:

Corcroft, Wayne and Schofield, John, A Fearsome Heritage: Diverse Legacies of the Cold War, Routledge, 2009.

BBC news article on the history of broadcast television

Yorkshire Post article on the history of Yorkshire Television         

History of Fylingdales official website

Further Reading:

ITV Yorkshire

History of ITV