The Beatles, Picasso, Maria Callas and Cumbernauld

Our World was a landmark in TV broadcasting - the first international live multi-country satellite link-up, a two and a half hour special dreamed up by a producer at the BBC. The content was strange and mixed: Marshall McLuhan talked TV in Canada, in Japan they showed the Tokyo subway system being built, and in Australia they showed a deep space object being tracked via an observatory. These days it's best remembered for The Beatles who used London's slot to premiere their new single All You Need is Love (in much the same way that George Michael did at the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony).

This video shows over an hour and a half of the broadcast. I was fascinated by the segment on the experimental new town of Cumbernauld which sneaked in amid the high profile featurettes on Picasso and Maria Callas. It starts at 23:3, with Magnus Magnusson narrating over shots of a branch of Halfords in the town's famous megastructure, children's drawings of the year 2000 and hipsters dancing at the groovy Golden Eagle hotel. All the cliches of New Town promotional film are there - stats on road safety, footage of a family in their new home, and sweeping statements about building a downhome utopia. But its setting, in this worldwide broadcast, is in its own way as incongruous and proudly local as a sequence in Danny Boyle's opening ceremony theatrics.