'...And We Can Now Cross Live To New York.'
The scene is a hushed auction house - the auctioneer, gavel in hand, efficiently taking bids on ornithological engravings by and later a - but in the corner something is stirring.
Panorama presenter Richard Dimbleby, tucked away in one corner of the auction house, speaking in expectant tones into a huge ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ microphone about what's about to unfold.
And what was about to unfold? Well, a Sotheby's auction of course. Nothing more? Well no and yes.
Panorama was simply giving its audience a glimpse of what happens during a Sotheby's auction.
The raison d'etre was that this was an auction happening at Sotheby's in London and New York. Live.
The programme was being broadcast live via the , the world's first commercial communications satellite launched on 6 April 1965. This edition of Panorama was broadcast some 6 weeks later, 45 years ago this week, on 24 May.
The , as it was nicknamed, was a revolution in communications and Panorama made frequent use of it, bringing live events, often from New York, into British homes.
Early Bird had its place in history cemented as one of the satellites used in the world's first global link up programme - most famous for the Beatles flower-strewn performance of .
Indeed so revolutionary was the technology that Panorama was able to broadcast a 20 minute item solely on what happens inside an auction room, simply because it was happening simultaneously in London and New York.
And strangely fascinating it is too.
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Regular readers of this blog will be aware how we like to try and draw out some of the parallels with what Panorama has reported on in the past and the present.
As you can imagine, drawing any parallels from this film is difficult.
In a world where air travel had not yet spread to the masses, Panorama had always prided itself on being a 'window on the world' for its audience from its earliest days.
It was often enough to simply show. Not necessarily explain or investigate but simply show.
Items like this perhaps marked the beginning of the end of Panorama's early purpose. That window would remain open of course but global events of
dictated the view and with them came a harsher tone. Editorial decisions were made less on the allure of new technology and increasingly on rigorous, investigative journalism
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At 14th Feb 2011, U14781767 wrote:All this user's posts have been removed.Why?
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At 20th Feb 2011, Kelly Flan wrote:When I moved to New York from Chicago last April, I had an awful lot of trouble picking a neighborhood. I looked at apartments almost everywhere—Williamsburg, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Chinatown, Tribeca, Soho, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village—and each seemed to have its own pitfalls and charms. Eventually, I settled on a place just off Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood that, ironically, hadn’t been on my not-so-short list originally. I’ve been happy here, but like most New Yorkers, I suffer from a bit of grass-is-greener syndrome. Would I be better off living in Astoria? Prospect Heights? Chelsea?It is of course impossible to come up with a completely objective answer to that question, but there is value in trying to understand and measure livability. Luckily, there is a wealth of information to study. The Bloomberg administration gathers reams of data about almost every element of life in the city—from potholes to infant-mortality rates—as do New York University’s Furman Center and the U.S. Census Bureau. Sites like Yelp provide a reasonably objective perspective on the popularity of neighborhood bars and restaurants. StreetEasy.com and Zillow.com publish the costs of apartment space per square foot. Ethnic diversity is now broken down in much finer gradients than black and white: You want to know how many Albanian-Americans there are in Sheepshead Bay?
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