Forty years ago this July the world was focused on one thing: the first footsteps of humans on another world. On July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Kennedy for a mission to the moon. Anyone conscious at the time will never forget those anxious days of wonder. Would the astronauts land safely? Would they be able to return?
The BBC-TV production “Apollo 11: A Night to Remember” (out on DVD) presents those memories from a British perspective. Culled from UK television archives, “A Night to Remember” will strike American audiences as familiar yet strange. Apart from the anchor desk in London, the BBC had their men at Cape Kennedy and Mission Control in Houston, unflappable chaps who tried on space suits and endured high-altitude, gravity-free tests for the sake of killing airtime. On the morning of take-off, the BBC pronounced the space crew “fit as a fiddle and ready to fly.”
The core footage, beamed from cameras aboard the Lunar Module, includes the same images seen all over the world. “A Night to Remember” shows the nail-biting descent toward the pitted lunar landscape, with the smooth surface of the Sea of Tranquility finally filling the screen. And then the dark, almost spectral shadow of Neil Armstrong descends from the module onto the powdery surface, and says, through a tinny microphone, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
