9/11: Fifteenth Anniversary

Continuing on from the discussion in the International News Presentation thread. The TV and radio coverage of the day's events in the US are well archived and freely available to access online on sites like Archive.org and YouTube, with the footage even beginning before the events have begun.

However there is comparatively very little of the UK's coverage available (with the exception of BBC World). There is a very low quality RealVideo clip of BBC One breaking into News 24 after the end of Neighbours, but no clips of ITV/C4/C5 starting their coverage. We know that Kirsty Young presented ITV's coverage. Do we know what C4 or C5 did?

Similarly with radio, we know that Mark and Lard were presenting on Radio 1 from Manchester when the first plane hit, and Chris Moyles' show was ambient music and news only, as covered in this excellent Soundtracking 9/11 article: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christopher-price/soundtracking-911_b_957331.html

However I don't think it is noted anywhere what Radios 2-5 did - and whether they similarly dropped music and continued their own separate programmes or, like when Diana died, joined up for a single programme from Radio 4?

There's also a lack of infomation about our coverage after the day itself and the little known national day of mourning on the 14th. I've tried looking on YouTube, but there's only RTE coverage from the day itself and nothing else. I'd like to find out more about our coverage.

What Five Live did that afternoon is quite well known. Simon Mayo was on air, having only recently joined the station

This is a programme they made for the 10th anniversary of 11/9 featuring lots of clips of that afternoon

https://archive.org/details/SimonMayos911Memories

Incidently he presented an interesting episode of Radio 4's Archive Hour a few years ago - The Day Before 9/11 about events and the state of America and the world on 10/9/2001

I'm not entirely sure why you're saying there's an lack of UK 9/11 television footage, in June you posted a three hour YouTube video of British news coverage from 9/11.






Sky News:



BBC/ITV:

All of that footage is from well after the main events of the day, they're mostly regularly scheduled bulletins or rolling news covering the aftermath. In comparison to the US news footage, there is little footage from around the time of the main events from channels like ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5.

Sky News are the exception as they have compiled official video for major news events like 9/11 and 7/7 for Sky's on demand service.

Thanks for this - I've somehow never come across it in the past when looking for more about the radio coverage from the day. So presumably Radio 2, 3 and 4 did continue to broadcast separate programmes.

There are snippets of info in the archived thread in this forum from the day. C5 had live news most of the afternoon apparently, C4 broke in, but not all afternoon

As mentioned, there isn't a great deal of the early BBC One/News 24 coverage available online, but there are many clips (without graphics and with ambient background music, presumably to reassure you that it's not live) on this BBC Choice documentary which was shown on the first anniversary:

Separately there used to be a video on YouTube showing the ITV News channel's early coverage of 7/7.

I seem to recall Rachel McTavish and Andrew Harvey were presenting that morning and they had to come out of a studio interview with Tessa Sanderson about winning the 2012 London Olympic Bid with reports of a power surge at Liverpool Street station. I seem to remember the most poinient thing about their coverage was the use of the city's traffic cameras. I'm sure they also, by chance happened to have one of their reporters (I believe Tim Ewart) and a camera team close to one of the bombing locations and were able to go live on the ground pretty quickly.

Back on topic I spotted this video on YouTube showing some of the remnants of the TV antenna from one of the twin towers.

https://youtu.be/p-dPLaOAaMk

What local TV and radio services did it transmit?

If it helps this was the presenting line up on BBC News 24 from 9/11 (from the archived TV Forum thread).

BBC News Special 1450-1600 - John Nicolson & Valerie Sanderson
BBC News Special 1600-1700 - Peter Dobbie & Jane Hill
BBC News Special 1700-1900 - Gavin Esler & Jane Hill
BBC News Special 1900-1930 - Huw Edwards & Jane Hill
BBC News Special 1930-2030 - Gavin Esler & Carrie Gracie
BBC News Special 2335-0030 - Peter Dobbie

Compare the Sky News video above to this VHS recording from the day itself by banned TV Forum member David Lees.

I seem to remember the Sky News footage of 9/11 had to have its graphics recreated for on-demand.

I'm the person who deals with our "Vault" content for On Demand. If you mean that we mocked up how the on-screen furniture used to look back then, that's actually not the case.


What was done was that we dug out the summary VT from that night's output and overlaid onto it modern name and context straps. I say "modern", but they're actually of the style from before the last refresh, whereas all the stories that were chosen for 2015 are of the current style.

Not to turn this into a plug, but there's 140-something items in there, and it took me nearly six months (alongside my other daily responsibilities) to get it finished, so I'd hope that those of you who have access to it will find it useful and engaging.