The 1960s witnessed the emergence of television as a global medium. One way of demonstrating the powers and possibilities of television was the production and airing of transnational broadcast events. In order to produce these, national broadcast organizations had to engage in joint production of such events. The article examines two such events: Gagarin's return to Moscow after orbiting the earth in April 1961 and the more well-known Our World' broadcast 6 years later. At the time of their production, these broadcasts were seen as crucial moments in television history, as prototypes of what could be expected of television in the future. They also relied on extensive cooperation between broadcast organizations in socialist and Western countries, organizations that to a large extent shared the same production values but also had to negotiate competing visions of the geography of modern communications networks. The broadcasts discussed in this article thus provide the opportunity to reflect upon the shaping of television history and global media memories. Based on case studies of the planning and production of the broadcasts, the article argues that global power relations have shaped the remembered history of television and therefore must be part of our understanding of it.

The sharing of expertise and know-how was an important practice in the early days of television production; delegations from national broadcasters visited each other to negotiate agreements concerning co-production and programme exchange. On one such occasion, in spring 1956, the BBC visited Soviet Central Television and their production facilities in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. Using that visit as vantage point, this article examines production values and professional ideologies in relation to the material spaces of television production. The article argues that the British delegation’s encounter with (un)familiar spaces of television production forced them to articulate their own production values in relation to material spaces. The final discussion suggests that the tensions provoked by the discrepancy between production values at Soviet Central Television and at the BBC may inform the main currents of television studies and television history. 

This article explores the relationship between historicality and historiography, with particular focus on the tension between claims of the historicality of broadcast events and later absences in broadcast historiography. It analyses two types of claims of historicality: first as a provider of images of history in the making; and second, as a kind of prototype, a forerunner of a new era in which television has a central position in a global society. Looking at the production and organization of the broadcast of Yuri Gagarin's return to Moscow in April 1961, the article argues that historiography is often too bound up in the present and remains blind to perspectives falling outside the dominant narratives of the current. The claims of being forerunners, on behalf of the agents involved in producing the broadcast, fit poorly with later historical events and are perhaps nothing more than the ruins of an anticipated future. But as such it may teach us just as much about the forgotten aspects of television history as it does about our practices of writing it.

On April 14th, 1961, television viewers across Europe watched live images of Yuri Gagarin being celebrated on the Red Square in Moscow. The broadcast was made possible by the linking of the Intervision and Eurovision television networks, which was the result of cooperation between broadcasters on both sides of the Iron Curtain. By looking into how the co-operation between the OIRT and EBU was gradually developed between 1957 and 1961 this article engages with the interplay between cultural, legal and technological aspects of broadcasting and how the transnational broadcast of Gagarin’s return to Moscow was made possible. The article furthermore argues the need to understand early television in Europe as a dialectic between the national and the transnational and shows how the live transmission network binding the East and West together was the result of an interplay between structures provided by transnational organisations such as the OIRT and EBU, and initiatives by national broadcasting organisations.