Aimed at general audiences and for use in education, Apollo in Ascension functions on multiple levels. Its primary remit was to promote the activities of Cable and Wireless by recording the building of the earth station, championed as a landmark achievement in the company’s history. Sir John Macpherson, the Chairman of Cable and Wireless, emphasised the broader significance of this undertaking, when stating in 1965 ‘We are proud to be playing a part in the Apollo project…It means that Cable and Wireless will have demonstrated its ability to organise and operate earth stations for satellite systems wherever required, in any part of the world’ (The Times, 19 October 1965, 6). The film’s awe-inspiring opening of NASA footage of men floating in space brings to the fore the wider context of the earth station’s crucial role in the Apollo programme and, by implication, the sponsor’s position in the vanguard of technological achievement. It also positions Ascension Island, a British territory, as an integral part of the Apollo mission, and endorses a colonial rhetoric of British technological and industrial development within previously desolate spaces.

This sense of development is evident in Julian Glover’s impersonal classroom-style commentary, which gives a succinct overview of the island’s history – from the time when it was used as a dumping ground for victims of yellow fever to its contemporary hosting of space communication systems. The logistics of constructing a satellite tracking station in such a remote location are also explained, with the inclusion of enough specific information about the system’s design and construction to satisfy a technically interested audience and animated graphics to ensure that this complex information is accessible to all audiences. The trade journal Film User praised the film for harnessing its disparate elements – ‘a mixture of the modern and the historical’ – and suggested that the film should appeal ‘especially to sixth forms’ (Film User, July 1967, 6).

As with his other Cable and Wireless commissions, Orrom sought to apply one of his longstanding precepts that documentary should relate its subject to a wider social milieu. In an interview for the Cable and Wireless magazine, Zodiac he stated: ‘I have tried in the films to bring out something of the social implications of communications to the setting in which they belong’ (Zodiac, No. 9, 1974). In the film’s outline Orrom wrote of his intention to create a ‘general feeling of strangeness and remoteness about Ascension’ to be ‘stressed within the sequences themselves, incidentally to the main story. This will often be achieved simply by the photography, particular colour effects, odd shots of wildlife and so on’ (Orrom, 1967). The muscular task of assembling steel structures is offset by the long pan-shots of lava shapes and rock formations. The film shows the industrial development of a remote part of the British Empire, but, as in much of Orrom’s work, still emphasises the human experiences. ‘We selected and filmed the key parts of the operations, always trying to relate them to the people involved’, Orrom explained, as he highlights the camaraderie of the workers and scientists (paralleling that of the film crew) unified in their fight against the clock [BECTU Interview, 1992].

The film’s underlying remit to promote Cable and Wireless’ involvement in the moonshot programme locates the film within a wider publicity agenda on the part of the government, who regarded technological prowess as an integral means of augmenting Britain’s identity both at home and abroad in the wake of its decline as an imperial power.  By the 1960s technology had become the greatest symbol of a nation’s international stature and military potential. Showcasing the construction of such a formidable communications structure on one of the remaining vestiges of Britain’s Empire may be seen as symptomatic of this political trend.

Katy McGahan (May 2010)