Telstar tales: Double, double toil and trouble 

10 July 2025 tbs.pm/82983

Telstar was launched into orbit earlier this year. Soon it will be joined by Project Relay. Much has been written about Telstar and will, no doubt, be written about Relay. But so far some stories have not been told. What did it feel like actually to be taking part in the first historic transmissions? IAN TRETHOWAN was the ITV commentator on the event and Fusion [the Associated-Rediffusion staff magazine] invited him to contribute on these pages.

Post Office personnel working in the bowl of the Goonhilly aerial. Photograph courtesy of H.M. Postmaster-General.

From Fusion, the staff magazine of Associated-Rediffusion, number 26 for October 1962

If a film magnate ever wants to make Macbeth without the expense of going to Scotland, he need not look farther than Goonhilly Down. It stands, a few miles from the Lizard, a flat, bleak bog, broken up with stunted, wind-blasted shrubs, and one sad, solitary, bent little tree. For centuries it lay there, unwanted and unloved. Then just a year ago – someone at last discovered that it had one virtue. A radio aerial stuck on top of it would have an uninterrupted view out across the Atlantic. Thus did Goonhilly come to take its place in radio – and television – history.

I would like to report that during those 48 hours in July when Goonhilly was inscribing its name in the record books, all of us down there walked around with a feeling of Destiny looking over our shoulders. In fact we were all so busy – and progressively so tired – we were all so preoccupied with our own little technical problems, that only afterwards did we realise what momentous events we had seen, and in a modest way, helped to fashion.

Again, I would like to report that the televising of Goonhilly saw the BBC and ITV – Raymond Baxter and Ian Trethowan – locked in some ruthlessly competitive struggle. But again, the facts are very different.

The control area at Goonhilly is smaller than Studio 9 [of Television House in London, which was 64x40ft or 19.5x12m – Ed], with only half the height, and with two-thirds of the floor area taken up by terrifyingly complicated equipment, and the other third occupied by a small viewing room, the two divided by a corridor. There was no question of both networks having their cameras there; the Goonhilly technicians were fairly appalled to find they had to put up with one camera, and it was only in the later stages that we somehow managed to wriggle in another.

And the position was even worse up in the control tower – an even smaller area, another clutter of equipment, this time splayed round a desk. Again, there was only room for one camera.

From the outset, therefore, it was clear only one network could put in its cameras; the BBC and ITV would have to share. But behind the cameras, there was an opposite problem. Because of the international complexities of the operation, there had to be a profusion of sound and vision lines running between Goonhilly and London, and there had to be several ampex channels available for various recording purposes.

So here, too, there had to be co-operation. For reasons which I am sure the technicians could explain, but left the laymen breathless, there were parked in the narrow Goonhilly car park seven assorted scanners, trucks and generators – five BBC and two ITV. Cables ran between the car park and the various camera and commentary points inside in a prodigal and disorderly profusion, as if a giant was trying to play ‘cat’s cradle’.

Ian Trethowan

And at the end of the line, Raymond Baxter and I sat perched on stools, which in turn had to be lodged precariously on a table. We peered over the top of a high partition, through the glass of the control room, down on to the row of electronic machines and their faithful keepers.

We went into operation on Monday, July 9 – the day before Telstar went up. This was fairly straightforward; just situation reports into the ITN bulletins. There was time to swot up what, for me, was a whole new jargon. Each time Telstar nipped round the world and came in range of the Goonhilly aerial – that was a ‘pass’. When Goonhilly picked up Telstar’s signals – that was ‘acquiring’ the satellite. The two little hooded screens with the dancing dots on them, rather like radar screens – those were ‘oscilloscopes’. My schoolmasters will testify that science was never my strong subject, and the prospect of reducing all the technicalities to words and phrases which the viewer could understand became more daunting with every hour. The technicians at Goonhilly, then as always, could not have been more helpful, but by the end of that day their smiles, I thought, were becoming a little strained.

Tuesday was to be ‘The Day’. Both Baxter and I had to do short reports for our bulletins, then pieces into our respective ‘warming up’ programmes. By the time the crucial ‘pass’ was due, we had become accustomed to hopping in and out of the vision of the one camera, to be told one moment, ‘Use the BBC mike’, then the next moment – ‘For the bulletin piece, you’ll use the ITV mike’.

However – by the time the vital ‘pass’ began – everything was sorted out. We knew the exact second when Telstar would come lobbing over the horizon and into range of the Goonhilly aerial. As the minutes ticked away – excitement mounted. Then – to the second – the figures showing the direction at which the aerial is pointed began to move. Guided by computed data – it was tracking the presumed course of Telstar. But was the data right? Telstar was thousands of miles away – up in space. The aerial’s radio beam has a span of only a few miles. The slightest mistake in computing – and it could be pointing hundreds of miles in the wrong direction.

Courtesy of Real Time 1960s

The ‘pass’ was due to last just over 20 minutes – and they were certainly among the most agonising 20 minutes I’ve ever experienced. From anticipation – through hope – to near despair – the Goonhilly experts worked feverishly – making minute adjustments to the aerial beam. The radar beams on the oscilloscopes searched frantically. But all to no avail. As the minutes slipped away – the bulb which would light up when Telstar was ‘acquired’ remained obstinately blank – the monitor which would pick up Telstar’s picture showed only a steady haze. Then – just two minutes before Telstar was due to disappear from view – a wobbling picture did emerge from the ‘snowstorm’ on the monitor. It was just discernible as a man. But within a minute – it had gone. They tried again at the next ‘pass’ in the small hours of the morning. They got a picture for a longer period – but still it was very hazy and broken.

To a layman – any picture marked success. But the Goonhilly men were even then certain they could do much better – and were bitterly confirmed in that view by the enthusiastic reports of the pictures received at the French station.

BBC TV Centre control during a live transmission for the United States

That night – and during the anxious hours of revision next day – one felt both sympathy and admiration for these men. Sympathy – because here was a group of G.P.O. engineers who for years had worked quietly in obscure back rooms and who now suddenly found themselves forced to conduct by far their most difficult experiment in full, inquisitive public view. One felt admiration because, in all their disappointment, they never allowed either temper or courtesy to fray. They remained unfailingly helpful to all our inquiries – and, by no means least, they were never anything but completely frank about their problems.

The events of the next day are too familiar to need repetition. The helpful but fatal advice given by the Americans the previous week-end was reversed, and Goonhilly, at the second attempt, picked up better pictures than either the French or the American stations.

But now came – for the television units – a quite unexpected crisis. While we were all toasting the successful scientists in champagne, someone rushed in with the news that on the next ‘pass’ – in about two hours time – the Americans wanted Goonhilly to transmit – to send, in other words, the first live television pictures from Britain to America. In despair the scientists turned to us for help: they knew how to send – but what should it be?

ITV and BBC producers and commentators quickly put their heads together. By international agreement, we could not send a ‘programme’ before the mammoth European combined effort 10 days later. But we roughed out a ‘test transmission’ – showing and explaining how Goonhilly worked and ending with a short message from the head of the GPO team. Baxter and I shared the commentary, and by television standards it was quite a simple job. But the scientists were delighted, and we had the pleasant feeling of having repaid a debt.

Concerning the television coverage for our home networks, it only remains to record that, for all the complications, so far as I know not once did Goonhilly fail to provide picture and sound right on time -although, in the words of Wellington, it was sometimes, ‘a damned close run thing’.