In August 1999 I found myself driving to Cornwall from Leeds, with my Yorkshire TV colleague John. We’d somehow crammed bicycles and a tent into his Saab. Our destination: Helston School.
At the BAAS Annual Meeting in Cardiff the previous year the head of science at Helston (Neil Tunstall?) had invited – as I recall – ‘everyone’ to come and join him and his students, and a bunch of the audience did just that. Two tents down from John and I, for example: Oxford Prof of Physics Frank Close, ever a friendly face.
John, another colleague Sally, and a YTV camera crew they’d dragged along were hoping to film some eclipse footage for a Channel 4 schools’ series they were making. I was just along for the ride.
Sadly, the Cornwall eclipse was, famously, a wash-out. Cloud blanketed the whole area, and apart from it all getting remarkably dark nobody saw anything. Quiet birds, drop in temperature: yeah yeah, that’s all nice, but we wanted the sun to be out so we could watch it, er, disappear.
The massive BBC outside broadcast effort managed to get a few shaky shots, but only by cheating, sending the RAF to fly a Hercules up above the clouds. Those of us on the ground saw nothing. Except…
Except we did. The 70 or so of us on the field at Helston shared a massively lucky cloud break, just before the end of totality. We saw the corona. We saw the diamond ring. We saw Baily’s beads.
It was about seven seconds of clarity, and it was breathtaking.
The YTV crew captured the lot, bless ’em. It took us a while to work out that we had the only ground-based footage of the Cornwall eclipse: the BBC had only the air footage, nothing from the ground, and it slowly became clear that Helston had had the only cloud break that coincided with totality.
“What do we do?” we wondered. We had the tape in our sweaty hands. We had no means of copying it or extracting the footage, let alone transmitting it anywhere. This was the Beta SP days, or possibly DigiBeta – we could only watch the clip back via the camera viewfinder. It looked good. But… who owned it? Channel 4 were paying, theoretically, but YTV probably held the copyright. Could we just unilaterally hand it over to the BBC and sort out the details later? How would we even do that? Could anyone get through the Cornish traffic in a car? How far was it to the BBC’s base – could we cycle it? Did the BBC (or their RAF chums) have a spare helicopter, maybe? How do you go about safely managing an impromptu landing on a school field? …
As it happened, I sort-of vaguely knew a couple of people working on the BBC show, including the producer, Phil Dolling. “Let’s try calling Phil, see if we can work it out.”
Within minutes Anneka Rice showed up with her pilot Keith, and there ensued a madcap dash across Cornwall in about four different types of transport, culminating in an unexpected milk float. Truly desperate efforts to get this priceless tape to the BBC so we could share it with the nation, as the minutes ticked by on their remaining schedule slot.
Only… tragically, that didn’t happen. Turns out, I didn’t know Dolling well enough for him to pick up my call while he was producing a multi-hour live outside broadcast, which… well, that’s probably fair enough. I couldn’t get through to his assistant Lydia, either.
So that was that. We had no other contacts. We sat looking at this tape, reeling from the surprisingly emotional experience which is a total eclipse, unable to share it all because the tech didn’t yet exist.
Because today, of course, two-thirds of the people on the school field wouldn’t have seen totality themselves anyway, they’d have been hiding behind their phone cameras, watching their screens instead. But as a result, there’d be 50 near-identical Instagram posts, beamed immediately around the globe.
There’s another coda to the story. Six years later I found myself accidentally producing the RI Christmas Lectures, working alongside legendary director David Coleman. Who had, because of course he had… directed the BBC’s eclipse special. So next time something like this happens, I’ll know exactly who to call, and maybe – just maybe – they’ll pick up.