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Asssassination of JFK - 50 years on

(November 2013)

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MA
Markymark

The BBC globe playing out for half an hour - must have felt like an eternity.


Probably not as much as you might imagine, the 60s and 70s were full of
hours and hours worth of the test card during the day, so to have 30 mins worth
of a caption, in silence, wouldn't have been that alien.

I understand but in the middle of programming and after the very brief announcement of the death of a President (especially during the Cold War era), surely it would have been at least a bit of a concern?


I 'll ask my parents, but I think the shock of what happened (as you imply) far outweighed what was or wasn't due to be screened, I'm sure most people simply turned the TV off, and discussed the implications (no bad thing IMHO)
UK
UKnews
The 90 minute broadcast of the funeral was the longest transatlantic satellite broadcast at that time and lasted 90 minutes, the maximum time permitted in those days. BBC Parliament have created special evenings of programming around less archival footage.

It would only have been around 25 to 30 minutes of live coverage that was possible. Telstar II was the available satellite- it wasn't geostationary so only was in range of both the US and UK for around 25 minutes in each two and a half hour orbit. (Thats based on the first Telstar- NASAs webpage says Telstar II was virtually identical.)

Sadly the rest of the page has gone missing, but an interesting list of early live satellite broadcasts can be found here http://archive.is/yvml - I've a feeling the end of the list is more incomplete than the start- there would have been more by then. Its also slightly wrong about the 1964 Olympics- so maybe there are more problems with it!
Last edited by UKnews on 23 November 2013 10:08pm

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