ITV Coverage
ITN provided the bulk of the coverage of the Apollo 11 mission for Britain's one commercial television station. The main front man for the bulletins was Alastair Burnet, assisted by science correspondent Peter Fairley and former employee of NASA Paul Haney.
On the night of the moonwalk, ITV chose a much lighter tone in covering the event than the BBC. With 16 hours of coverage, in between news bulletins was David Frost's Moon Party, a discussion and entertainment show made by London Weekend Television. It featured showbiz personalities such as Peter Cook, Cilla Black, Cliff Richard, Lulu, Mary Hopkin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Hattie Jacques and Eric Sykes. It was said to feature "relevant facts about the moon landing" with "a wealth of outside comment", that according to one commentator "broke up the mood of awesome solemnity that tends to afflict those occasions." The show continued until 3am, and singer Engelbert Humperdinck, who also featured, was said to have collapsed from exhaustion due to its epic length. The show, transmitted from London Weekend's Wembley Studios, also featured more serious guests, such as Desmond Morris and Dame Sybil Thorndike. Author Ray Bradbury objected to what he saw as the frivolous tone of the show, and walked out before he could be interviewed.
Around midnight, a serious discussion on the ethics of the moon landing was held, with historian AJP Taylor and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. "forming a somewhat bizarre alliance in attacking manned space flights." The show continued for longer than expected as the film Down to Earth was cancelled when NASA had brought forward their schedule by several hours; originally the moonwalk had been planned for 7 a.m. British time.
There were also reactions from the public at Trafalgar Square and from British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and Peter Sissons interviewing experts including Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank.
For the coverage of the moon landing itself, ITV used computer captions such as "Armstrong taking manual control" and "Touchdown, The Eagle has landed". The captions were made by listening to the Houston-Lunar Module talkback, then entering in computer codes, which translated the Eagle's speed and altitude into on-screen information. Paul Haney described the moonwalk on the coverage as "the greatest thing to happen since fish crawled up on the beach and survived." On the landing he remarked the landing was only four miles off the point projected "which is pretty good for Government work". Reminiscing in 1999, ITN producer David Nicholson remembered it as "perhaps the most exciting twelve minutes I've ever seen on television. It was a hugely thrilling moment. I remember in the ITN control room there was a gasp from the production staff."
In his diary on 21 July 1969, comedian Michael Palin wrote "the extraordinary thing about the evening was that, until 3:56 am, when Armstrong clambered out of the spaceship and activated the keyhole camera, we had seen no space pictures at all, and yet ITV had somehow contrived to fill ten hours with a programme devoted to the landing." Comparing the BBC and ITV's takes on the broadcast, Stanley Reynolds in The Guardian commented: "Perhaps on no other programme have we seen quite so clearly the basic differences between the two television services."
Michael Billington reviewing in The Times was much more favourable to the ITV coverage. He said they had "seized the initiative" off the BBC. "In the past it has always been the BBC that has been ready to abandon its schedules to suit historic public events: yesterday, however, the traditional roles were reversed and it was the BBC that persevered with Dr. Finlay's Casebook and The Black and White Minstrel Show while independent television showed itself far more flexible and enterprising." He praised Frost for the way he "chaired the proceedings with his usual unflappable professionalism" and Burnett for "combining straight news with personal comment", though he said "the combination of news and variety is more debatable. There is certainly something a bit strange about going straight from a discussion about the orbit of Luna 15 to hearing Cilla Black singing her latest recording. On balance, I think this type of juxtaposition is justified, if only because some point of rest is needed in a programme of this length. The danger is that the viewer will be so saturated with information that his responses will be blunted when it comes to the moments of real excitement: pop music, however, provides the necessary let-up and fulfills much the same function as comic relief in a five-act drama.
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