The Universe will be televised: space, science, satellites and British television production, 1946–1969
The Universe will be televised: space, science, satellites and British television production, 1946–1969
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宇宙将被电视转播：太空、科学、卫星和英国电视制作，1946 年至 1969 年
DOI：
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
D. Kirby
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
J. Farry;D. Kirby
This essay uses material from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) archives to show how space-related technoscientific activities played a key role in the development of BBC television. The essay focuses on a crucial period when this influential cultural institution transitioned away from radio as their primary broadcast medium in the 1930s and 1940s to reluctantly embrace television in the 1950s and 1960s. Space-related activities, including astronomy, cosmology, rocketry, aerospace engineering, astrophysics and interplanetary research, played a key role in the modernization of BBC television broadcasting in two intersecting ways. Space-related material provided informative, yet popular, programmatic material that helped BBC television compete in an increasingly commercialized media market, and, later, space projects supplied technologies that impacted on the mechanics of broadcast production and transmission. The profile and prestige of space as a topic, in particular, its visuality, the drama of exploration it presented, and its association with celebrity scientists like Bernard Lovell and Fred Hoyle, meant that such programming became a crucial business asset for the BBC and a professional asset for ambitious producers who saw its commercial potential. Following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, space technology became further intertwined with the development of British broadcasting as the fields of satellite communications and broadcasting transmissions infrastructure converged. In particular, BBC producers promoted the potential development of communication satellites within their television programming by portraying such satellites as plausible and necessary for the advancement of civilization, and most crucially, as a prospective British Space Race achievement.
