Watch on the world

FOR the first time, a British television news programme is to cover the world from the world.

In The World Tonight starting on Tuesday, an international television link-up will put on your screens a running news documentary that has never been attempted before.

It will show the world to Britain as the world sees itself — not simply as a snap report from camera crews who dash in and out from one news area to another.

In the past, as the programme’s executive producer Tim Hewat points out: “British TV has covered the world from London. This, apart from other disadvantages, has led to producing stories that are exclusively British orientated. We see things happening in, say, Tokyo, as through British eyes. We will show them happening as seen through the eyes of people in their particular part of the world.”

To achieve this global flavour The World Tonight has set up a complex network of five key bureaux where permanent representatives will compile their reports.

As in London, there will be a The World Tonight team in Rome, and Tokyo. Paris and New York, plus roving producers Dietrich Koch and Russell Spurr. We introduce to you here these highly specialised people and take you into the environments from which they work to bring you The World Tonight.

Over to Tokyo and Australian journalist John Maher. Tucked away on the ground floor of a four-storey building of Fuji Telecasting Company is the cramped but efficient nerve centre of The World Tonight‘s Japanese bureau.

Space in this building, which houses most of the throbbing soul of Japanese TV, is at a premium. But John opted for his tiny, 10ft. square, pastel green office with its duck-egg blue Venetian blinds right here next to the cameramen and technicians, rather than select a more spacious apartment away from all the action.

To New York: Imagine Wardour Street, running like a spine through London’s Soho — spiritual home of British film-makers. Now imagine it blown out, big and broad and wide. That’s 53rd Street where nearly every door leads to a film studio, a cutting room, a producer’s plush office, a script writer’s den.

Here, for the new programme, work producer John McDonald and reporter Bill Biery in a comfortable atmosphere of controlled luxury. Off-white, deep-pile carpets, a Telex machine mumbling quietly to itself in a corner, leather chairs, coloured telephones. Efficiency — American style.

To Rome: Producer on the spot is Hugh Pitt. His beat ranges from the entire Mediterranean coast to the troubled oil kingdoms of the Middle East.

London: Reporter Jo Durden-Smith is 23, one year down from Oxford. He works from West End offices with live con tradictory clocks, a massive wall chart and an ordered confusion of scripts.

Paris: Sparkling, magic, feminine city. Appropriately, a woman-on-the-spot — Producer Joan Harrison, chooses to work from her sedate apartment a stroll from the Champs Elysées. In this fashionable part of the city she sits with French reporter: Denise Fabré sifting material.

All aiming to bring the world to you.