One World Flight
January 14, 1947 – April 8, 1947 · 13 broadcasts
One World Flight is Norman Corwin's landmark documentary of a war-scarred world feeling its way toward peace. In 1946 Corwin won the first One World Award -- a round-the-world trip endowed in memory of Wendell Willkie -- and accepted it as a working assignment, setting out from New York with a CBS recording engineer and some 225 pounds of temperamental wire-recording gear. Over four months and roughly 42,000 miles across sixteen countries he gathered more than a hundred hours of voices: heads of state and ordinary people alike, "prince and fellah, commissar and coolie," all weighing the prospects for a lasting peace under the new shadow of the atomic bomb. The thirteen half-hour programs that resulted aired on CBS on Tuesday nights from January to April 1947, each built around the recordings from one leg of the journey -- Britain, Western Europe, Sweden and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Egypt and India, the Far East, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand. Carried on a major network at a time when CBS and NBC still effectively banned recorded sound from the air, the series helped pioneer the actuality-based radio documentary. It aired opposite Bob Hope and drew little audience, and it proved to be Corwin's last major series for CBS -- in April 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed his scripts. Twelve of the thirteen broadcasts survive; the Soviet Union leg of February 11 is lost.
Episode Spine
1947
One World Flight is Norman Corwin's landmark documentary of a war-scarred world feeling its way toward peace. In 1946 Corwin won the first One World Award -- a round-the-world trip endowed in memory of Wendell Willkie -- and accepted it as a working assignment, setting out from New York with a CBS recording engineer and some 225 pounds of temperamental wire-recording gear. Over four months and roughly 42,000 miles across sixteen countries he gathered more than a hundred hours of voices: heads of state and ordinary people alike, "prince and fellah, commissar and coolie," all weighing the prospects for a lasting peace under the new shadow of the atomic bomb. The thirteen half-hour programs that resulted aired on CBS on Tuesday nights from January to April 1947, each built around the recordings from one leg of the journey -- Britain, Western Europe, Sweden and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Egypt and India, the Far East, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand. Carried on a major network at a time when CBS and NBC still effectively banned recorded sound from the air, the series helped pioneer the actuality-based radio documentary. It aired opposite Bob Hope and drew little audience, and it proved to be Corwin's last major series for CBS -- in April 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed his scripts. Twelve of the thirteen broadcasts survive; the Soviet Union leg of February 11 is lost.