Now, five years and 34 programmes later, is a good time to look back on Intertel during its formative years. Its pre-eminent achievement perhaps is that it is still in existence. In television so much is transient, often necessarily so, that it is not easy to maintain any regular and systematically planned exchange of programmes over a five-year period. But Intertel has continued: a slender bond linking television audiences of many millions throughout the English-speaking world. Its programmes have been seen on television in 28 countries besides Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States. Subjects have ranged from American aid in South-East Asia, Pakistan and Ghana to the Canadian separatist crisis which preceded the Queen’s visit in 1964; from problems of old age in Italy and Sweden to young people growing up in Czechoslovakia; from the racial tensions of the American South to colour in Britain.
Location shooting and first-hand reporting has always been the rule whether in Africa; in North, Central or South America; in the Pacific Islands and Antarctica; in Australia, Japan and South-East Asia; in the Near East; in Europe and in Scandinavia. Intertel crews have slept under a basketful of human skulls hanging from the rafters of a communal long house in Sarawak. They have seen marigolds and carrots growing in an underground hothouse at the South Pole. They have been honoured at a regatta night organised by the yacht club in Wajir, Kenya (which owns no boats and is 300 miles from any navigable water).
All this has promoted close and cordial relations between the Intertel members. Annual Council meetings have been held in rotation in Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia. A planning group of producers has met regularly to review current projects and plan future ones. Documentary film makers with international reputations like Douglas Lieterman, Denis Mitchell and Peter Morley have contributed notable programmes to the Intertel series. Writers of the calibre of James Cameron, Paul Johnson and Robert Kee have added their skills to help communicate information and impressions of world problems and complexities that can only be eased by knowledge and understanding.
It is a task vastly too great for Intertel, but one that broadcasters have a responsibility to contribute towards, perhaps even more in the future as television audiences multiply throughout the world, than in the past five years. In the carefully chosen words of the citation to the Peabody Award in 1965: ‘in the fragile field of international co-operation and understanding, a strong bond has been formed by the documentaries produced by the five-year-old Council of the International Television Federation, known as Intertel, which links the English-speaking nations through the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Britain’s Rediffusion TV Ltd and, in America, the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company and National Educational Television. By sharing these special programs which focus on contemporary forces at work in the world today, Intertel has made the first continuing contribution towards international understanding through television.’