The Dish

Parkes, New South Wales: a small town with a few hundred sheep and a satellite dish the size of a football pitch. And this is the town charged with providing the pictures for man’s first lunar landing. An excellent little Aussie comedy with echoes of Local Hero., The residents of a sleepy Australian town are thrown into disarray when Nasa decides to use their satellite dish to transmit the first moon landing to television sets around the world, upsetting their normal routines as they struggle to ensure the operation goes without a hitch., Stars Sam Neill as the scientist in charge of the telescope in outback Australia that is charged with relaying the pictures of Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk to the world. Unfortunately, there’s a slight problem…, In 1969, NASA employs a backwater Australian town’s enormous telescope to beam images of the moon landing worldwide., In this comedy, as American astronauts prepare to make one giant leap for mankind, a small Australian town stumbles through its own small steps to help. In the summer of 1969, Cliff Buxton (Sam Neill) leads a team of scientists overseeing the operations of one of the world’s largest radio telescope dishes, nestled in a New South Wales community of sheep farmers. As NASA prepares for Apollo 11, the first manned voyage to the moon, Buxton and his crew are asked if they will allow their telescope’s dish to be used as a backup receiver for the television transmission from the moon, should the main receiver in California fail. Buxton and his men are more than happy to help, and the village is agog as they gear up for their own small part in one of the world’s greatest adventures. Mayor McIntyre (Roy Billing) and his wife May (Genevieve Mooy) are thrilled to be greeting a small but steady stream of important visitors, though many of the locals are not especially good with etiquette, and several members of Buxton’s team, most notably high-strung Mitch (Kevin Harrington), are less than enthusiastic about Al Burnett (Patrick Warburton), the know-it-all NASA technician brought in to oversee the Australian operations. When a change in Apollo 11’s schedule means the Australian dish will have to pick up the vital broadcast from the moon, Cliff, Mitch, and Al must put aside their differences to pull the show together. Though played for laughs, The Dish was inspired by actual events., Rob Sitch (“The Castle”) directed this lighthearted comedy about a backwater Australian hamlet that is thrust onto the international stage in 1969 when NASA recruits the town’s enormous telescope to beam television images of the moon landing worldwide. Sam Neill, Patrick Warburton, Kevin Harrington, Tom Long, Genevieve Mooy, Tayler Kane., Gentle comedy about the rural Australian satellite station responsible for transmitting television coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing to the southern hemisphere. Based on the true story of the events in the country town of Parkes in 1969.