Intertel: The Lost History of a Critical Moment in Transnational Documentary

In 1960, a group of public and commercial television companies, based in four different countries, came together in one of the most remarkable transnational initiatives ever undertaken.  Called INTERTEL, it promised to “catch history as it occurs” by creating a series of hour-long prime-time documentaries to be aired in Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States, each providing an in-depth look at a different part of the world, to document the enormous social changes taking place as the Cold War reached a peak and as postwar modernity spread across the globe.  The participants included the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and National Educational Television, but significantly also Associated-Rediffusion, a British commercial broadcaster, and the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, a US commercial station owner, which partnered with NET.  The only rule:  no broadcaster could focus on its own national environment, but must turn its attention to other parts of the world, including its partner nations.

The series ran until 1969, producing incisive and controversial works on all four member nations, Cuba, Vietnam, France, Tahiti, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and Israel, among others, as well as special topics such as race, birth control, cancer, old age, and education, usually from a cross-cultural perspective.  Today only a small subset of the documentaries can be found, in widely scattered archives, and the history of this ambitious initiative has never been told.  Bringing it out of historical obscurity on this panel, in conjunction with those who are working to restore access to public television’s neglected history, will inform historians about an important new source of historical documentation, as well as illuminate some critical tensions in early television, both public and commercial.