Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5pm, January 15th, 1959, from the City Road studios in Newcastle. A quarter of a million viewers watched on the first night. By all accounts, the early years at Tyne Tees were ‘cheerfully haphazard’, seat-of-the-pants television that ranged from local talent on live variety shows with a shade of the ‘end-of-the-pier’ about them to serious politics and sports. One old City Road hand described the experience as hectic, like ‘being on a switchback ride’. Show...

Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5pm, January 15th, 1959, from the City Road studios in Newcastle. A quarter of a million viewers watched on the first night. By all accounts, the early years at Tyne Tees were ‘cheerfully haphazard’, seat-of-the-pants television that ranged from local talent on live variety shows with a shade of the ‘end-of-the-pier’ about them to serious politics and sports. One old City Road hand described the experience as hectic, like ‘being on a switchback ride’.

Show business may have been the backbone of Tyne Tees TV production in those first years but the screens buzzed with imaginative regional documentaries that reflected a growing sense of identity between the station and the north-east communities it served. Tyne Tees reporters also blazed a trail in presenting the news over the years. Mike Neville, a much-loved face of TV news in the north east for more than 40 years who launched his broadcast career with Tyne Tees, once suggested that the launch of Tyne Tees enabled local people to be able to hear local accents and dialects on television where once the BBC’s standard cut-glass pronunciation was the norm. Vox pops, credited as a Tyne Tees TV invention, were one of the staples of regional news magazine programmes, although interviewees were not always as young as these excitable kids who visibly delight reporter Phil McDonnell with their imaginative ideas about going to the Moon.

Both television and the space race were significant weapons in the Cold War competition between the USA and Soviet Union, at its height in the 60s and 70s, with international diplomacy often conducted on the television screen. The space race was triggered by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, which stoked fears about their ability to deliver nuclear weapons over intercontinental distances. This coup in the propaganda wars of power and military and technological superiority prompted President John F. Kennedy to pursue Project Apollo with the aim of landing a man on the moon.  

This news piece captures some of the electricity on the British airwaves surrounding the space race as the USA geared up for their second manned spaceflight, NASA’s Apollo 8, launched on December 21, 1968. It became the first manned spacecraft to reach the Moon, orbit it and return. In a year that had seen political unrest on the street globally, Apollo 8 arguably took off some of the heat and refocused attention on the fragile earth. Media was an important part of the mission, the most widely covered since the first American orbital flight, with television transmissions from the craft to introduce the astronauts who gave their impressions of the lunar surface. Frank Borman described "a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing" albeit without the monsters envisaged by these primary school children. Moon watchers could not help but associate the moon’s desolate surface with the devastated landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the USA’s detonation of nuclear weapons in 1945, and some newspaper editorials, such as that of the New York Times, pursued the environmental message. The Earthrise photograph taken by the crew has been credited as one inspiration for the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970.  

As American scholar Daniel J. Boorstin argued in his book The Image, published in 1961, television was beginning to organise history. A year after Phil McDonnell promised the gaggle of star struck boys that they would certainly appear on the Today at Six news programme, Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. Astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first person to step on its dusty surface and his first task was to switch on a television camera, which broadcast to more than 600 million people he and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin’s momentous moon walk. Soviet viewers were not amongst them. They were treated instead to a Soviet musical. A brief announcement appeared later in the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Pravda.

References:

Tyne Tees Television: the first 20 years, a portrait, Antony Brown (Tyne Tees Television, 1978)

Cold War Modern Design 1945 – 1970, Eds. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (V&A Publishing, 2008)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8