FEATURE
“The hardest thing of all, was when to speak. That was probably equal in terms of my memory of the scale of this amazing occasion.” JAMES BURKE “All you could do is really just prepare as well as you could, because the flight plan, while containing a vast amount of technical data, and which I learned rapidly to understand, didn’t say things like ‘What’s it like on the Moon, what are they going to do, what are they going to say on the Moon?’” “As you know when you’re on television live there’s a thing in your ear so the control gallery people can ask you questions or talk to you. I remember when the pictures came down from 11 and we saw the surface of the Moon for the first time, the director said, ‘What are we looking at it?’ I had to say to the audience, ‘What are we looking at? I have no idea because nobody’s ever done it before!’” Preparation for the BBC’s coverage began months ahead of the mission date, at least from Burke’s point of view. “I started doing the detailed reading probably a couple of months ahead,” he explains. “One of the astronauts once said to me that flying to the Moon is nothing but minutes and seconds, because every minute and second there was something to do. So looking at the flight plan in great detail you knew what was going to happen technically, every second. “Then, of course, we went over to Houston and to
the Cape to interview people who were either engineers or flight controllers or the astronauts themselves. We would go over for maybe two weeks, we were looking for a lot of material because flights to the Moon were really radio programmes and now and again there was a bit of television. So there was a lot of material to fill in.” Once back from Houston, preparations began in earnest for the Apollo 11 broadcast. On the night Armstrong said those famous words, both the BBC and ITV were on air for 11 hours, a historic moment for British television as it was the first all-night broadcast. Looking at it with 50 years of perspective, you would expect the presentation team would have spent hours rehearsing what they would say, but that’s not the case. “We rehearsed in the sense that you sit at a desk, and somebody says, test your microphone. But there were no real rehearsals,” says Burke. In fact, he describes the event as being like a horse race in the sense that “you know when the horse race starts and you sort of know when it ends, and in between you react to what’s happening.” “There was a kind of studio technical rehearsal on the day but that was no more than just testing the plugs. There was no way to rehearse anything to do with the mission itself. It was the most live event that ever happened, and you had to react to it as it happened. Now they would rehearse for all eventualities, but television back then was a lot more live than it is now.” Looking back on those hours on air, how did Burke feel as he took his seat next to Moore and Michelmore, knowing that what was about to happen would be such a major part of history? “I suppose apprehensive was the word,” he admits. “There’s a contradiction involved. As a journalist, the last thing you want to do is run out of words and you have to be fluent in explaining whatever it is that you’re explaining. Whether it’s your point of view or a question, you don’t want to run out of words. At the other end of the scale the problem was when to know to shut up. Because the unforgivable sin would be to talk when an astronaut talks, and since you never know when
TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 13