By working from his archive of paperwork and scripts, which I suspect may include programmes no longer held in the BBC archive, Turnill provides a lot of detail about the flights themselves, and what did and didn’t go right. He tells us he couldn’t, at first, shake the hand of Wernher von Braun because of the man’s involvement in the wartime bombing of London — Turnill and his family lived in Sydenham. Over time, their relationship mellows and Turnill quotes from this own lengthy, revealing interviews with von Braun, yet remains unsure about his legacy.
We learn, too, of the celebs at the launch of Apollo 11 on 16 July 1969: former President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Spiro Agnew, air pioneer Charles Lindbergh, rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth and science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke — the latter stopping by Turnill’s news desk to rehearse what he was going to say on screen to Walter Cronkite at CBS.
We’re also told who wasn’t there — Nixon attended the launch of Apollo 12, in the cold and rain, but no others. John Freeman, former presenter of the BBC programmes Panorama and Face to Face, was now US ambassador and had been to the launch of Apollo 10. To explain why he turned down the invitation to the next one, his spokesperson responded, “When you’ve seen one Apollo launch, you’ve seen them all” (p. 231). Turnill clearly finds that indifference amazing.
I’m especially, nerdily, thrilled by all the mechanics of the TV and radio coverage, the way improvements in satellite and camera technology shaped what could be shown, and the gossip about “the BBC’s never-ending internecine warfare” (p. 389) between three of its own departments: News and Current Affairs, which Turnill worked for, and Outside Broadcasts were both based in Lime Grove, while Science and Features, led by Richard Francis and Aubrey Singer, was at Kensington House.
The different teams were instructed by the BBC’s director-general to collaborate on the Mercury 9 launch in 1963, but Turnill explains that this, “was really a victory for Science and Features, who could not now be excluded” (p. 82). Francis quickly set about organising a big TV special.
“Robin Day, newly recruited from Independent Television News to Paul Fox’s Current Affairs team, who were the principal customers for Outside Broadcasts facilities, happened to be in New York working on a political contribution to Panorama. He was told to drop everything and stand by to ‘anchor’ live TV coverage via satellite.” (p. 82)
But Day declined, knowing nothing about spaceflight, so Turnill got the gig.
He and Francis seem to have got on well enough until October 1968 and the launch of Apollo 7. Turnill describes Francis arriving at Cape Kennedy with a “posse” of assistants and secretaries to mastermind the TV coverage, and maddening the team back in London by adopting “space-speak”: “affirmative” and “negative” instead of yes or no, “go” and “no-go” when something was or wasn’t possible. Then, on 20 December, Turnill felt it his duty to share a weather report that suggested there would be little to see of the launch of Apollo 8. Francis felt this cost them a million TV viewers on the BBC at lunchtime on Saturday 21 December (a few hours before the broadcast of Episode 8 of Doctor Who story The Invasion). Decades later, Turnill was unapologetic about what he had done:
“I had no guilty conscience even when the launch weather and the view of lift-off were spectacularly perfect!” (p. 156)
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he was squeezed out of the TV coverage of Apollo 11 the following summer.
“The reason I was unemployed at this supreme journalistic highlight of my career was that the BBC’s ‘Apollo Studio’, at Shepherds Bush for TV, and at Broadcasting House for radio, had insisted on taking over the launch coverage. The studios were packed with ‘experts’ who had to be given something to do, and once again it had been a case of ‘leave the facts to us, Reg. We’ll just come to you with the question: What’s the atmosphere at the Cape?’ Since most of the experts had never been near America’s space programme, I was well aware that they would call upon me for tougher explanations than that if anything went wrong.” (p. 234)
Turnill was clearly hurt and frustrated at being squeezed out, and annoyed by TV executives wanting him to emphasise drama — he tells us there was no real risk to the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts (!) so is withering about Burke crossing his fingers on TV. He also says a key problem was the focus on live pictures, with better-quality colour or film images of no interest to the editors because they arrived half-an-hour later than the less good live images. The sense is that the public appeal of the spaceflights — or, in some cases, the lack of it — was shaped by the coverage on TV, which was in turn led by the prejudices of the execs. Turnill says he was “baffled” by such decisions, then adds,
“TV executives tend to have literary rather than scientific backgrounds” (p. 189).
He refers to the “experts”, in quotes, as “superfluous” (p. 261), and claims they had no or little knowledge of spaceflight, not least because they’d not been to the Cape. That’s not true of James Burke, who Turnill mentions just twice in the whole book, who pre-filmed a series of reports at different NASA facilities and was very good on technical detail. I would like to cross-check the account here with Burke’s own memoir from 2019, James Burke: Our Man on the Moon.
Turnill does not name at all the other members of the TV crew covering Apollo 11, such as Patrick Moore, Cliff Michelmore and Michael Charlton. Charlton reported from Houston, and Moore was hardly inexpert in matters of space — the Apollo astronauts made use of his maps of the Moon. So it’s a rich text, full of fascinating detail and stuff that isn’t quite as straightforward as the author makes out. I found it utterly compelling.
More of this sort of thing:
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