Wide Wide World
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Wide Wide World was a 90-minute documentary series telecast live on NBC on Sunday afternoons at 4pm Eastern. Conceived by Pat Weaver, the show was first introduced on June 27, 1955 as part of the Producers' Showcase series. It returned in the fall as a regular series, telecast from October 16, 1955 to June 8, 1958. The program was sponsored by General Motors.
Dave Garroway was the host of the series which featured live remote segments from locations throughout North America and occasional reports on film from elsewhere in the world. The series carried live events into four million households. The October 16 premiere, "A Sunday in Autumn," featured 50 cameras in 11 cities, including a college campus, the fishing fleet at Gloucester, Massachusetts, rainswept streets in Manhattan and Monitor broadcasting in NBC's Radio Central studio. An appearance by Dick Button ice skating at Rockefeller Center was canceled because the rain had washed away the ice, and a curious coverage by a nervous Ted Husing of an attempt by Donald Campbell to break a speed record showed nothing more than his boat, on the other side of the lake, failing to take off. Time reviewed:
- NBC's Wide Wide World whisked its audience all over the map. The camera lazed its way down the Mississippi, poked into a New Jersey lane where lovers walked and old men raked autumn leaves, wandered around Gloucester harbor as fishermen mended nets. There were vivid contrasts between the chasm of the Grand Canyon and the topless towers of Rockefeller Center, the swaying wheat fields of Nebraska and the money-conscious hubbub of the Texas State Fair, an underwater ballet from Florida and the overwater speed trials of Donald Campbell's jet racer at Arizona's man-made Lake Mead. Always there was the immediacy of things happening this very minute, but the real brilliancy of Wide World may lie in its avoidance of the TV interview. The only one attempted, at the Texas Fair, proved again that—given a microphone and someone to interview—an announcer can turn any subject into a crashing bore. The words needed in Wide World were supplied by Dave Garroway and kept to a literate minimum. [1]
Future episodes included a visit to the Museum of Modern Art on April 27, 1958.
ESPN's Steve Bowman described the logistics involved in setting up a live remote at Arkansas' Claypool Reservoir where George Purvis, head of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, put 300,000 ducks on NBC:
- There were many hurdles. Initially Purvis dealt with how to hide TV cameras, crews, control trucks and the necessary workmen and equipment and how to get electricity and telephone lines two miles to the woods.
- "To start with, the only way to get to the spot selected was over two miles of muddy woods roads where only tractors had gone before," Purvis recalls. "The cameras would be two miles from the nearest power line or telephone. This meant using power generators placed far enough back in the woods so as not to disturb the wary ducks. Six telephone circuits were needed to send the audio part of the program to New York.
- "Even after stringing two miles of wire there was just one circuit from Claypool's Reservoir to Jonesboro, 20 miles away. So a radio loop was installed at the barn to cover the 20-mile gap." Camouflaged blinds were built for television cameras and operators, one of which was 40 feet up a hickory tree. An additional blind was built for the remote control truck.
- The video would go from the camera to the control truck via the cable, then to an 80-foot relay tower 1,000 feet back in the woods, then 35 miles to another relay tower, then 40 miles to a third tower before being sent to Memphis. There it was transmitted 1,200 miles to New York where the audio and video were combined to be broadcast live. With the electronics in place, the only thing left was to make sure that at an exact prearranged time there would be ducks in front of the cameras — over a quarter-of-a-million ducks. [2]
