Ted Turner promised NCS would keep on the air till the end of the world. In basic Turner style, he made certain somebody had the tape prepared.
The video itself is hauntingly easy.
It opens with a static extensive shot outdoors NCS’s unique headquarters at the Turner Broadcasting Techwood campus in Atlanta. Standing in formation are musicians from U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine bands, wearing full ceremonial uniforms. Behind them is an American flag. There isn’t any narration, no graphics, no dramatic modifying and no anchor making an attempt to elucidate what viewers are seeing.
The band slowly begins taking part in Nearer, My God, to Thee, the Christian hymn famously related — a minimum of in common legend — with the final moments of the Titanic.
The footage seems to be unmistakably outdated tv: grainy customary definition, tender colours and a 4:3 side ratio constructed for the box-shaped TVs of the early Eighties. The digicam barely strikes. There are not any close-ups. The ambiance is solemn, virtually eerily calm.
Then, after a couple of minute, the video merely fades to black.
That was apparently the plan for humanity’s final signoff.
Turner had publicly foreshadowed the concept when NCS launched on June 1, 1980.
“Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends,” he declared. “We’ll be on, and we will cover it live, and that will be our last event.”
He added that NCS would play Nearer, My God, to Thee earlier than going darkish.
At the time, many assumed Turner was joking, or just indulging his popularity for outsized statements. But the tape was actual, rigorously archived inside NCS for many years underneath the title “TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO.”
According to former NCS intern Michael Ballaban, who leaked the footage on-line in 2015, the clip carried an inner warning in NCS’s archive system: “HFR till end of world confirmed.” Hold for launch.
The wording solely deepened the mythology round it. Confirmed by whom? How precisely does one confirm the apocalypse? Would the final NCS producer left alive must name Standards and Practices earlier than urgent play?
The tape turned one of the enduring legends of NCS’s early years, handed round newsrooms virtually like an city fantasy. Turner often referenced it publicly, and media stories about its existence appeared as early as the late Eighties, however few outdoors NCS had really seen it till the leak.
The video additionally captured one thing important about Turner himself.
NCS was based on an concept that appeared ridiculous at the time: folks would watch the information 24 hours a day. Before NCS, tv information arrived in scheduled bursts — morning updates, night broadcasts and nightly recaps. Turner envisioned one thing fixed, fast and international.
The doomsday tape was the purest expression of that ambition. NCS wouldn’t cease for scores declines, company mergers, wars or political upheaval. It would cease solely when there was actually no one left to look at.
The clip’s simplicity is a component of why it endures. There are not any explosions, mushroom clouds or cinematic results. Just a army band taking part in a hymn whereas the world supposedly disappears someplace off-camera.
It feels concurrently absurd and oddly transferring — theatrical sufficient to be unmistakably Ted Turner, however restrained sufficient to really feel honest.
The tape even drifted into popular culture. Gremlins 2: The New Batch featured an identical end-of-civilization broadcast, whereas NPR later produced a parody imagining its personal apocalypse protection. Online, the NCS clip turned a form of artifact from a bygone media age: a second when tv networks nonetheless noticed themselves as nationwide establishments that may accompany humanity all the strategy to the end.
And in some methods, the tape says as a lot about NCS’s early idealism because it does about Turner’s ego.
The community that invented around-the-clock information imagined itself not merely reporting historical past, however witnessing the final chapter of it. The doomsday video was by no means meant to be sensational. It was ceremonial — a final transmission from the machine Turner constructed.
The man who created 24-hour information additionally deliberate its final minute.