South Africa's First TV Outside Broadcast
Kyalami Grand Prix - March 1971
Brian Horn
The first television outside broadcast (OB) occurred in March 1971 nearly five years before television came to South Africa. At that time the only country that had a television service was Rhodesia, which was monochrome (black and white). The OB, which was done in color, was coverage of the Grand Prix at Kyalami. On completion of the event the video tapes were rushed to Jan Smuts airport by helicopter and sent off on a flight to London. The following day they were seen by audiences around the world.
Held on 6 March 1971 the South African Grand Prix was the first race in the eleven races in the 1971 World Championship series. The race was won by Mario Andretti who was driving for the Ferrari team. It was his first Formula One victory, he would not win another Formula One race until 1986.
Numerous television equipment manufacturers were interesting in being considered as suppliers if and when South Africa decided to introduce a color television service. Two of these manufacturers, Pye TVT from the UK and Thompson CSF from France, both brought out equipment to enable this event to be televised and seem by the rest of the world for the first time.
Pye TVT OB Van
The Pye TVT OB van was shipped to Cape Town and then driven the 1,400 km up to the Grand Prix location at Kyalami just north of Johannesburg. When the OB van arrived on site the driver did not realize that the grassy areas between the dirt roads had a soft surface, resulting in the vehicle being bogged down. So the first order of business was extracting the vehicle which took up most of the following day.
Two engineers were sent out by Pye TVT to manage the technical aspects of the Outside Broadcast. The crew included Keith Dunford (TVS Broadcast Systems), Malcolm Ramsay (Gallo Electronics), Brian Horn (Rhodesia Television) together with local production staff.
The preparations for the OB started a week before the race, during which time the drivers were practicing. Being a first for many of the team this period was used to resolved any issues. One of the functions of the engineers was to handled vision control, which was the technical control of the cameras. One of the functions was to do color correction to the cameras which ensured the video feeds were displaying the correct image colors. The british based engineers were used to a different climate, where the grass was green. It was a surprise to them it was pointed out the color of the gass was not green, but brown, it took a walk around the surroundings to convince them.
Thompson CSF OB Van
The team from Thompson CSF consisted of two engineers and a marketing person. The French had used their political connections, their OB van being flown in and given priotity clearance at Jan Smuts airport. Nothing was checked by customers officials, because if they had they would have found one crate of electonic equipment was in fact filled with french wine and cheese.
The Thompson CSF team had the backing of the French government and its connections to South Africa. The South African Air Force (SAAF) provided a Alouette helicopter to be used to provided aerial coverage of the grand prix.
The helicopter flew with its doors open, the cameraman was seated in a harness and was suspended in the door opening. There was a wireless link from the helicopter to the
OB van when then provided a feed to the Pye OB van. It took quite a lot of practice before a stable video feed was received from the helicopter. There were two reasons,
first the pilot had to follow the cars around the track staying ahead of the lead car. This required a lot of practice is handling the bends in the race track. Initially the
helicopter would keep going straight, not making the bends in the track to follow the cars. The pilot however soon learned to anticipate the bends and banked the helicopter
accordingly. This led to the second issue, when the helicopter did a steep turn the cameraman in his harness was actually suspended outside of the helicopter. This led to some
wild video scenes of trees, the sky and sometimes the cars. Lots of practice in the week before the race lead to sucsessful coverage of the race.
The helicopter team would spend long times in the air and would radio in with their order of lunch, never landing but hovering as show in the photo as their order was passed
up to them.
Ampex VTR Van
Ampex provided a VTR van to record the event using a VR2000 2" video tape machine. The Ampex engineer was "crazy" Dick McEwen.
The video tapes were a flown to the Jan Smuts airport by the SAAF helicopter. They were then flown overnight on BOAC to the BBC in London who broadcast them the following day.
