Forum for former BBC staff

Forum for former BBC staff
http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> History >> Apollo 13 http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1563298794 Message started by Douglas on Jul 16^th, 2019, 5:40pm

Title: Apollo 13
Post by Douglas on Jul 16^th, 2019, 5:40pm

As a young BBC TV Cameraman, (Crew 14, Dave Mutton Senior) I had the privilege of working on Apollo 13 coverage at TVC.
At one point during the coverage, when "nothing " was happening, most of the Crew went to the Restaurant.
No transmission at that point.
Of course...... that was when it all went pear shaped.
Manning the only live studio camera (as I recall) ... "Houston, we have a problem"

The crew were immediately called back from the Restaurant, and manned Cameras & Sound etc

That was a heart stopping moment.
What an introduction to live TV !

I do remember the really obvious graphics throughout, "the capsule is in the water !" etc

Most of us didn't go home when shift ended, we stayed on and watched the Apollo mission.

We saw a lot of incoming feeds that were not broadcast.

Title: Re: Apollo 13
Post by Colin_W on Feb 1^st, 2023, 11:34pm

My father Bill Watters was a TM2 Lighting on some of the programs that covered Apollo. I was just a 10 year old schoolboy.

I dont know if he covered Apollo 11 but I half remember him mentioning there was some brief panic when low resolution footage from the Apollo 11 lander arrived upside down.

The camera was mounted upside down on the lander and after a few moments the images were turned right way up by the format converter on Earth. Apparently not everyone knew this would be necessary these initial upside down images caused some panic.