Background
“Our World” was the first live, international, satellite television production, which was broadcast on 25 June 1967. Creative artists, including The Beatles, opera singer Maria Callas, and painter Pablo Picasso — representing nineteen nations — were invited to perform or appear in separate segments featuring their respective countries. The two-and-half-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that date: an estimated 400 million people around the globe watched the broadcast. The project was conceived by BBC producer Aubrey Singer. It was transferred to the European Broadcasting Union, but the master control room for the broadcast was still at the BBC in London. The satellites used were Intelsat I (aka “Early Bird”), Intelsat 2-2 (“Lani Bird”), Intelsat 2-3 (“Canary Bird”), and NASA’s ATS-1. Today, it is most famous for the segment from the United Kingdom starring The Beatles. They sang their specially composed song “All You Need Is Love” to close the broadcast.
[Wikipedia]
see also:
Our World – All You Need Is Love (2)
for later received info!
Chris Booth writes:
I’ve just had an enquiry about “Our World”:
Would you mind clarifying something? Several years ago, I transferred the ” videotape of that program as recorded in the U.S. As you may have recalled, the BBC switched and fed the European feeds and the U.S. switched everything else. It appears that the U.K. and European video was all optically standards converted to 525 there in London then satellited to NET in NYC…
On the Beatles “All You Need is Love” portion, it appears that this was all black and white camera originated (Marconi’s?). The optical standards conversion didn’t help much in making that determination but nonetheless it appears that way. I really don’t think that the BBC or anyone else would have used colour cameras in the early PAL days if the broadcast was intended to be black and white.
Can you once and for all tell me what equipment was used and where for that Beatles segment?
Can anyone help? I worked on the VT bits, but can’t recall the tech info about sources.
Alec Bray
Standards Conversion at TVC in the mid-sixties (especially to 405 line) involved pointing a CPS Emitron at a monitor …There was, I believe, some form of prototype electronic standards conversion, reading in the TV signal and reading it out at a different line speed or equivalent, housed in racks and racks of equipment.
Gary Critcher
The “All You Need Is Love” section of ‘Our World’ (1967) was transmitted from Abbey Road (studio 2, I think) and was shot in black and white.
[Ed: since this page was first published, more information has been provided by David Taylor]
David Taylor
… EMI Studio 1…
[Ed: For a comprehensive, minute by minute description of the planning, rehearsal and transmission of the Beatles segment in “Our World” please see David Taylor’s full account HERE ]
Gary Critcher
“The Beatles’ Anthology” videos actually took the BBC Black and White and colourised it. Lots of colour photos had been taken on the day, so they knew what everything looked like in colour.
I remember the first time I saw it fade into colour during the intro of the song….the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end – electrifying!
Bill Jenkin
“Our World” was in 1967 and although there was some colour equipment about by then the programme itself was definitely monochrome. I know because I worked on the studio bits and we were in a black and white studio – TC1 Television Centre.
The globe that is sometimes shown at the start of the Beatles sequence was in TC1. I am fairly sure that The OB unit itself was also black and white, it was at E.M.I.’s Abbey Road studios in North London.
I have also read elsewhere that the section was ‘Colorized/Colourised’ for the “The Beatles Anthology”.
The whole show was live. This was part of the production brief. The only recorded section was the insert from Mexico which was recorded locally in Mexico. They were only allowed to do this if they made it clear that it was recorded so they had shots of people watching the VT machines before cutting to the recording!
David Denness
It was indeed at EMI studios
The Beatles segment was shot in colour and recorded in 525 NTSC for the US market at the same time as the live broadcast. The OB unit was colour, owned by the UK facilities company Intertel, hired by ABC TV of USA and directed by them with the cooperation of George Martin.
In 1967 Intertel had two O.B. scanners. Their first scanner was equipped with RCA TK47 (I think) which had 3 inch IO tubes.
The second one, new in 1967 which was used for “Our World” had Phillips PC60s. It had a Neve sound desk and home built intercom. The TV sound supervisor was David Ashley-Smith, assistant Brian Taylor, one of the cameramen Colin Callow and engineers Steve Beamish, Chris Evans and Vic Cornish.
I wasn’t actually there on the day but had recently left the BBC and freelanced regularly for Intertel at that time and knew the guys who did the show.
Both scanners were built primarily for the US market (US TV stations had loads of money in those days as they still had cigarette advertising) and spent lots of time in mainland Europe covering sport for USA in colour as no-one else had colour (or color) facilities this side of the pond.
I left the BBC in 1962/3 to be one of the original cameramen for the “Tower of Babel” Intertel unit based firstly in Munich and then in Switzerland. They also started the UK unit based in Ealing. This was all black and white of course and yes, over the years, we did a lot of sports for American, UK and European channels. They then closed down the European unit (the two trucks sold to South America apparently) and some of us transferred to Ealing. Although I left shortly after, they were then in the throes of building a brand new colour unit, the first in the UK I believe. My reason for this short build up is to confirm my personal experience of Intertel up to that time. Perhaps worth mentioning for historical reasons, a little remembered fact is that the pharmaceutical company Glaxo Smith and Kline already had a full broadcast-quality mobile colour unit on the road for some time but it was used only for their own medical products promotion purposes and was not available for outside hire.
Roy Garner
I was the senior cameraman on that shoot,
Intertel covered scores of productions for ABC, NBC and many other customers.
Louis Barfe
The “…Anthology” segment doesn’t look 525 to me, so I’m assuming that the ABC colour recording must have been separate, and that Apple had BandW VT from the BBC 625-line OB, which it then had colourised.
Mike Giles
What was the Bristol OB involvement then? I was quite sure that they were there.
David Taylor
It’s MCR28 from Bristol [Ed: and this is confirmed in the MCR 21 Restoration Newsletter ].
[Ed: For a comprehensive, minute by minute description of the planning, rehearsal and transmission of the Beatles segment in “Our World” please see David Taylor’s full account HERE ]
Bill Jenkin
Maybe there were two scanners there. One for the Beeb/Our World, the other for ABC/George Martin?
If anyone was actually there in Abbey Road can they shed any light on the matter? I tried researching this a few years ago and got the same conflicting reports.
Would the BBC have used the output from an Intertel scanner in those days?
Mike Jordan
I was sent out (probably from London TV Switching Centre or Lines department in BH at that time) to hide out in TC1 camera store or similar under the gallery to liaise with Gippie Joe for all the extra bits of wire for Comms circuits around the world – such glory!
[page updated: 07 September 2020]
