Our World, the first live global TV show

1967 Our World was broadcast globally, the first live international satellite television production and a significant event in the world's unfolding sense of globality.

Performers in twenty-six nations were invited to perform in separate segments featuring their country, and the six-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that point: 400 million people around the globe were watching live, your almanackist included.

Today, it is most famous for the British segment which starred The Beatles. They wanted to spread a message of peace to the world, so they broadcast a live set singing 'All You Need Is Love' which had been written especially for the occasion. The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon and Graham Nash, among others, showed up and sang along. The performance was done after one take in rehearsal.

The equator was crossed for the first time in the program when it switched to the Australian contribution, which was at 5:22 am Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT). This was the most technically complicated point in the broadcast, as both the Japanese and Australian satellite ground stations had to reverse their actions: Tokyo had to go from transmit mode to receive mode, while Melbourne had to switch from receive to transmit mode. The segment dealt with trams leaving the Hammer Street Depot in Melbourne with Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Brian King explaining that sunrise was many hours away as it was winter in Australia ...

See the colourized video of The Beatles recording 'All You Need is Love', today in the Book of Days.

Categories: television, beatles, video, rock-music, youtube