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| nasamad | Great find Mark, classic piece of tv history that I missed the first time around (mind you I was either not yet born or a few months old at the time!) | |||||||
| dom | Fantastic. What a true professional James Burke is — able to keep talking through all that! But seeing this makes me angry that most of the BBC's Apollo footage was erased soon after the moon landings. I note that there's a 'BBC FOUR' tag on this piece of film... anyone know when it was shown recently? And why? | |||||||
| dom | A little bit of research leads me to believe this is from a two-hour documentary called "Apollo 11, A Night to Remember" broadcast on BBC Four in February 2006. This collected all the surviving BBC footage of Apollo 11. | |||||||
| Jay Chladek | Oh man, this is why I love the BBC as they treat their audience like they have brains! James explained the whole suit quite well and was perfectly frank about it. He didn't giggle in the awkward spots and he didn't try to show off either. The Shower bit with "Fly Me to the moon" was also a nice bit of English humor as well at just the right point. I wonder if they had any outtakes from that scene though. Doubtful, but it would have been interesting to see them. | |||||||
| gliderpilotuk | Brilliant. James Burke was a childhood hero together with the likes of Raymond Baxter for their erudite, non-patronising science presentations. Sadly a thing of the past. Burke now does public speaking amongst many other things and was involved with SETI. | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | What I'd really like to see is the doc Burke made that was shown at the close of Apollo 17. He was really pessimistic about the likely future of American space efforts. This was a film called "The End Of The Beginning" and was shown at 01.20 in the morning on 7 Dec 1972, to take us through to the live coverage of the Apollo 17 countdown. I think it very likely that this still exists at the BBC. I recorded it, but at that time, of course, in audio only. | |||||||
| Buel | I’ve just stumbled across that there was a James Burke documentary called "The End of The Beginning" and found this thread. I thought it worth bumping in case anyone has located a copy? | |||||||
| spaced out | Here are two excellent James Burke documentaries on YouTube from the BBC broadcast on the same night on the 10th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1979: The Men Who Walked on the Moon They include some fun conversation with Duke, Cernan, Schmitt, Lovell, Scott, and McDivitt gathered together in a hotel room, plus some separate stuff with Shepard. James Burke mentions in both documentaries that he didn't think it likely that people would walk on the moon again in his lifetime (he was 42 at the time). Image quality (likely VHS transfers) isn't great but they really are very watchable. | |||||||
| Buel | Agreed. I thought both were wonderful. Did you notice the (what I thought was) Apollo 16 rug in Charlie Duke's home? I asked him if he still had it and he replied “The Apollo 16 photo is actually a coffee table made with small tiles and made in Matamoros. We still have it." Does anyone have any idea where I/we can get hold of "The End Of The Beginning" documentary? | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | This is something of a Holy Grail for James Burke fans- a 1972 BBC documentary which aired in the early morning before the launch of Apollo 17 and has never been broadcast again. It's in the BBC Archives, but has never been released on home video or online. This is a wonderful reconstruction by "Lunar Module 5" from an audio recording. A marvellous piece of work for its time, sadly very accurate in its pessimistic predictions. | |||||||
| Blackarrow | Since you were able to establish that the documentary "The End of the Beginning" is in the BBC archives, were you able to identify any other BBC Apollo material? For instance, it is well known that the BBC accidentally (?) wiped their Apollo 11 EVA coverage, but what about their extensive coverage of the later Apollo missions, particularly Apollos 15, 16 and 17 with the extensive rover TV footage? Might some of this have been kept in the archives? | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | I think I asked an online archive group (might have been Kaledioscope) if it was in the Archives. They maintain databases of BBC, BFI, etc. Sorry, can't add more. | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | UPDATE: I got a reply from someone at the BBC Archives in Perivale who says: We appear to have lots of incoming feeds archived, some with commentary from James Burke etc, but I don't see any studio stuff with BBC presenters. I guess the live studio coverage itself probably wasn't recorded for posterity.Another told me the following exists, but not what is in them all:
APOLLO 15: The launch of the Apollo 15 space mission from Cape Canaveral with astronauts Dave SCOTT, Jim IRWIN & Al WORDEN. VT recording of live satellite feed.Unfortunately, they are not available for public viewing. | |||||||
| schnappsicle | quote:Spacecraft Films put out a series of all the the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions on DVD. The Mercury and Gemini DVDs show all the film shot of those missions and are consolidated on a few DVDs. The Apollo DVDs are one mission for each set. They have a very comprehensive EVA coverage including the audio from the drives between rover stops. The Apollo 11 DVD is only missing the video of them discarding their PLSS's and other unwanted stuff following their EVA. I'm not sure what's missing on the other Apollo sets, but they seem to have the complete TV coverage to me. You might want to check them out if you haven't already. | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | I think Geoffrey (Blackarrow) means the BBC coverage, e.g. BBC studio presenters, voice-overs, etc. | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | Further update, someone else (Paul Vanezis) posted this (he is the acknowledged expert on this material in the archive community): For much of these recordings all that exists are incoming feeds from the US via satellite. | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | And one more, it's confirmed that the documentary The End of the Beginning (see above) does still exist in the BBC Archive at Perivale. | |||||||
| Blackarrow | Yes, I was referring specifically to BBC transmissions. Some of this material has made its way onto YouTube (I have the unedited BBC coverage of the Apollo 16 launch presented live from KSC by James Burke). However, it is very frustrating that much other material exists in the archives, but clearly isn't going to be transmitted. Is there no mechanism by which this material could be transferred onto DVD or Blu-ray (for greater storage capacity) and sold to interested parties (myself included)? If enough people are willing to pay a reasonable price to cover copying costs, could this material be made available? Earlier in this thread I think someone mentioned the BBC "Sky at Night" DVD "Apollo 11: A Night to Remember." I believe that contains all surviving BBC Apollo 11 footage, so clearly some of this surviving material has been released to the public. If the rest of it is ever going to be released, now is the time, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the last Apollo mission and (we hope) the start of the next series of lunar missions. That might attract an audience of both "old-timers" and "new recruits." Captain Apollo: thank you for this fascinating information. Any thoughts about whether (and how) it can be taken further? | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | Technically, you can contact Perivale and ask to view it for research purposes. Often the BBC are reluctant to release material for rights reasons (even to people featured, e.g. if you were on a news show or whatever), but I'd have thought all of this stuff bar the UK v/o was public domain. I'll ask. | |||||||
| Captain Apollo | Reply: Sadly no, we have no facilities for members of the public to view it or have copies made.That's even though you paid for it via your BBC licence fee. The archive is essentially for in-house purposes it seems. | |||||||
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