by Joe Moran
This strangely gripping programme was just a test for the coronation broadcast nine days later. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, refused his request to allow cameras into Westminster Abbey, the BBC’s director of television, Gerald Cock, found the one place in London along the procession where you could get a close-up without interruption: the central plinth of Apsley Gate. While the Post Office laid eight miles of television cable from Alexandra Palace, Cock went to Buckingham Palace and asked King George VI if he would smile into the camera when his carriage passed. The king agreed and wrote on a slip of paper that he kept inside the coach, ‘Look right outside the window at Hyde Park Corner and smile.’43 The coronation crowds were fixated on how close they would get to the new king and queen and how much they would be able to see of them. The must-have item along the processional route was a periscope. When the king smiled directly at viewers, it offered them the proximity and sensation of real life that the crowds craved.
At a Southgate cinema, about a hundred people saw it on one small television, and stood up and cheered at the end. A similar crowd gathered round a set in a marquee at Ranelagh polo ground. Manufacturers’ and retailers’ estimates that over 50,000 people saw the procession ‘astonished the most hopeful’, although the BBC guessed more cautiously at 10,000. A small army of viewers scattered from Ipswich to Brighton had seen, said the corporation, ‘a phenomenon which would have been hailed in any other age either as a miracle or as a piece of witchcraft … Trains were an improvement upon stage coaches; mechanised flight, on ballooning; but television is an improvement on nothing. It is something new under the sun.’44
The most eagerly awaited programmes were outside broadcasts, particularly sport. The BBC was there on Monday 21 June 1937 for the first day at Wimbledon, although the link with Alexandra Palace was difficult because of the hilly terrain in between. To take advantage of the rising ground towards Wimbledon Common, the television signal was sent by cable across the car park to Barker’s sports ground, 700 feet from Centre Court – an area now better known as Henman Hill, where fans gather to watch the fate of gallant British losers on a giant TV screen – and transmitted from an aerial on top of the turntable ladder of a London fire engine. Hornsey Central Hospital near Alexandra Palace was right in its way, but the hospital secretary agreed to suspend all diathermy activities (heating internal organs by electric current) while Wimbledon was on so as not to ruin the reception.
As viewers joined the tennis, Bunny Austin, the great almost-champion of Wimbledon and the last of the gentleman amateurs, was stuttering to a win against G. L. Rogers. The court was too big for the screen and the grass-stained ball could barely be distinguished from the grass, but critics stressed the positives. ‘It has seldom been possible to watch the progress of the ball itself,’ conceded one forgiving reviewer. ‘But the strokes and the movements about the court have all been so clearly visible that the absence of the ball has hardly seemed to trouble the viewer after his eyes and his spectator’s reactions have become accustomed in a minute or so to the strangeness of it all.’45
On 11 November 1937, the television cameras were at the Cenotaph for a memorable two minutes’ silence. Shortly after the last chime of Big Ben had died down, a man broke through the crowd and ran into the road, screaming ‘All this hypocrisy!’ and something else that sounded like ‘Preparing for war!’ Half a dozen policemen gave chase and, just yards from the prime minister, clambered on top of him and muffled his cries. The man turned out to be Stanley Storey, an ex-serviceman who had escaped from a mental asylum. The TV picture was in long shot so viewers just heard ‘hypocrisy!’ and saw the crowd swaying slightly, before it settled back into a vast, uniform mass, with just the background noise of distant traffic, birdsong and shuffling feet. This was why the BBC had lobbied hard in the 1920s to broadcast the silence on radio. It knew that simply shutting down the airwaves for two minutes would not have the same impact as this resonant near-silence. The effect, strangely, was magnified when you could see it. ‘The television cameras make a naturally impressive scene even more impressive,’ concluded the Radio Times. ‘Watching the Silence, broken by the rustle of falling leaves in Whitehall, is an unforgettable experience.’46
Cyril Carr Dalmaine, viewing the silence in a room above Dorking High Street, had more technical concerns. He felt he was being offered a foretaste of what television would be like when the engineers had sorted out the problem of interference. ‘As cars, buses, lorries outside switched off their engines and came to rest, so did the crackling fade from the sound reception and the spots from the viewing screen, rather as if some unseen smudge had been wiped off a palette,’ he wrote. ‘For those two minutes the picture came to us clean, clear and steady – like a photograph.’47 Dalmaine was the real name of Jonah Barrington, the radio critic for the Daily Express, and both he and his newspaper were proselytisers for television. The Express had sold some of the first DIY television kits in the early 1930s and, at a time when the BBC was not listing an official reception map, issued its own unofficial ones: a radius around London with dark and light shading to indicate how likely it was you would get a good picture.
Like Gander, Barrington had high expectations of the medium, making it clear how unimpressed he was by the decision to televise the formal opening of the new lift at Alexandra Palace. In August 1937 he organised the Daily Express Television Exhibition and visitors came from as far as Penzance and Newcastle to see every make of television set. One woman, peering into one, said how wonderful it had seemed when she was young to hear someone’s voice over a telephone: ‘We never thought we’d have anything more marvellous than that, and now here am I, over seventy, seeing someone dancing eight miles away …’ A month later, Barrington organised a Daily Express exhibition touring the home counties with a television van showing the daily broadcasts, starting at the Grand Theatre, Woking. He inaugurated the exhibition live on television from Alexandra Palace, thus becoming, he claimed, ‘the first man in the world to declare an exhibition open without bothering to be present’.48
The cameras were also there for Neville Chamberlain’s arrival at Heston Airport after his meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in September 1938. ‘No one knew what had happened until, stepping from his aeroplane in front of the television cameras, he told them,’ said The Times. ‘This had a quality of history in the making that no other outside broadcast has equalled.’49 The return from Munich later that month was also televised: this time the result was known and the mood celebratory. The broadcast, on a Friday afternoon, was not pre-announced so perhaps only a few hundred viewers saw the plane circle in the air, land and taxi up to the waiting group of cabinet ministers, and Chamberlain step out smiling. He aimed his famous, fluttering piece of paper at the newsreel cameramen and press photographers, but these viewers were the first to see it, and they could even make out traces of writing. The commentary, broadcast simultaneously on radio, was by a 25-year-old Richard Dimbleby, who had persuaded BBC News to make him its first ‘News Observer’ and who was single-handedly creating a new sort of journalist: the on-the-spot observer with a microphone in his hand. ‘It’s a real triumph, this arrival,’ Dimbleby said in a fresh, piping voice quite unlike its postwar incarnation. ‘Oh now listen: a very tuneless version of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” … Those of you who are looking as well as listening to this will be able to see this …’
Television could still not decide if it was a public spectacle or a domestic hobby. On 23 February 1939, Eric Boon fought Arthur Danahar to retain his British lightweight boxing title at the Harringay Arena, and the fight was shown on BBC television at three London cinemas, the first ever pay-per-view televised sporting event. So large was the crowd at the Monseigneur News Theatre in Leicester Square that about a hundred people swept aside the doormen and charged into the auditorium without paying the steep entry fee of one guinea. Police reinforcements arrived to halt the stampede, but the gatecrashers were allowed to remain. The Marble Arch Pavilion
and the Tatler News Theatre in Charing Cross Road were also packed, with people standing along each wall and sitting in the aisles. Some were dressed in evening dress and ermine furs, others in cloth caps and mackintoshes.
The cinema-sized picture was far from perfect. A trainer’s waving towel sent a band of whiteness rushing across the screen, and sometimes the pictures dissolved into irregular patterns, to the sound of whistles and catcalls. ‘Boxers looked like ghosts,’ wrote a reporter at the Marble Arch. ‘You could see the ropes on the further side of the ring show through their bodies; you could see wicked punches that sailed straight through shadowy white figures. It was like moving spirit pictures. But if you went to see a fight, you forgot that.’50
The imperfections were indeed soon forgotten, as shouts and applause in the cinemas merged with the sounds from the arena. The audience could make out Danahar’s textbook punch, the straight left delivered standing side on, while the smaller Boon stood flatfooted, ducking and weaving to get inside his opponent’s longer reach. Both men floored each other several times until, in the fourteenth round, Danahar rose weakly and the referee declared Boon, his face splashed with blood and one eye completely closed, the winner. A nineteen-and twenty-year-old had pummelled each other into near oblivion, live on television. People in Boon’s home town of Chatteris in Cambridgeshire had asked the police if they could watch the TV set in the station but they refused, in case it interfered with police work. But as soon as the referee stopped the fight, the local inspector sent up a firework to let people in the Fens know their man had won. Boon’s mother watched at a friend’s house in the town, turning her face away from the screen and wincing whenever her son was hit.
Many thought the Boon–Danahar broadcast was the future of television: large crowds congregating in cinemas and other public places to watch live sport and spectacle. But it was really Mrs Boon, watching in an ordinary living room, who foretold the future. As Alan Hunter wrote in the Radio Times, ‘When on my home television set I see Jasmine Bligh announcing the programme, she seems to be speaking to me, not to thousands of others, as in a cinema. An aspect of intimacy, if you like. But one that can be utterly destroyed with even a small crowd in a demonstration room.’51
These home viewers were forging a strong, intimate relationship with the performers. The Alexandra Palace offices filled up daily with appreciative letters and cards. When the palace was shrouded in London fog, as happened often, and most dramatically on Christmas night 1937, viewers with cars rang to ask if they could drive the artistes back to their homes. When viewers called after a programme, the performers would speak to them on phones in the corridors outside the studio. The comedian Cyril Fletcher, who appeared regularly on pre-war television, got to know certain callers well. Just before Christmas 1938, Gerald Cock sat at his desk on camera and invited viewers to ring him up and ask questions. As they phoned from as far away as Birmingham and Margate, Cock feigned panic to his off-camera secretary, whispering out of the side of his mouth, ‘Phew! I got over that fence.’ Then to wind things up, just before a woman called to say that she thought television ‘marvellous’, the presenter of radio’s Children’s Hour, Uncle Mac, rang up to wish Cock a happy Christmas.52
In other ways, the audience seemed furtive and unreal, and Alexandra Palace residents had to find more creative ways to speculate about them. A young BBC producer, Royston Morley, kept a lookout, while driving his car, for television aerials on chimney tops, which he saw on average about every five minutes. On the palace esplanade, the performers looked out on to the redbrick avenues of Stroud Green, Finsbury Park and Hornsey, middle-class real estate and native soil of the television aerial. In the distance, they could make out the Kent and Surrey Downs, which blocked the TV signal’s journey further south. Seventeen-year-old Dinah Sheridan, after performing in the play Gallows Glorious, stood on the palace steps looking at the shimmering lights of London and wondered ‘how many of those houses had a TV set and had seen what we had just done. Probably less than a hundred.’53
An engineer wrote in Wireless World that unsentimental technicians like himself, who were ‘steeled to derive no more interest or emotion from the most sublime sound than from a test oscillation’, were now captivated by the television programmes. On the televising of the departure of the king and queen for Canada in May 1939, as they drove through waving crowds from Buckingham Palace to Waterloo Station, he noted that he had seen viewers cheering as if they were standing on the kerb while their majesties passed by, something that never happened in a cinema during the newsreels. Even the slow pace of television compared to the newsreels was an advantage, for you didn’t feel ‘battered and jerked around the high-spots of the week’s action throughout the world in five breathless minutes like a thousand horse-power butterfly’. When an ordinary film was televised you immediately noticed the difference, for the commentator had that ‘slightly breathless declamatory style, as if he is afraid of being thrown out before he has said all he wants to’. On television, speakers calmly addressed the individual viewer, and the sound of frying fat in a cookery demonstration was so convincing that ‘one instinctively draws one’s legs in to keep them out of range of grease spots’. Nor was the small screen a problem. If you were close enough it was the same size as a cinema screen viewed from the best seats, and ‘a penny held at arm’s length is in effect larger than the sun’.54
The domestic audience was middle-class, though not exclusively so: Bruce Forsyth’s garage-mechanic father, for example, had bought a television for their house in the solidly working-class area of Edmonton in north London. The social makeup of most viewers probably accounted for the evening programme not starting until 9 p.m. The later-dining middle classes would finish eating about fifteen minutes beforehand, gather in the sitting room with coffee and cigarettes, and wait for the valves of the set to warm up and the picture to appear, with the same air of expectancy they might feel in the theatre. As a phenomenon yet to spread to the masses, television does not seem to have been an object of intellectual disdain. Virginia Woolf wrote to her nephew Julian Bell, teaching in China: ‘Oh dear how I wish television were now installed and I could switch on and see you.’55 As a loyal patron of Selfridge’s, Woolf is likely to have seen television there. Her friend, Marcel Boulestin, an expat Frenchman who owned a Covent Garden restaurant which sought to wean the British away from stuffy haute cuisine, was the first television chef. Since all his dishes had to be prepared in fifteen minutes, one of his earliest broadcasts introduced British viewers to the kebab.
Other members of Woolf’s social set certainly saw television. ‘V. and I go round to the Beales’ where there is a Television Set lent by a local radio-merchant,’ wrote the National Labour MP and writer, Harold Nicolson, in his diary on 4 February 1939, after visiting a neighbouring farmer at Sissinghurst in Kent. ‘We see a Mickey Mouse, a play and a Gaumont British film. I had always been told that the television could not be received above 25 miles from Alexandra Palace. But the reception was every bit as good as at Selfridge’s. Compared with a film, it is a bleary, flickering, dim, unfocused, interruptible thing, the size of a quarto sheet of paper such as this on which I am typing. But as an invention it is tremendous and may alter the whole basis of democracy.’56
Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West, busy creating her celebrated garden at Sissinghurst, might have been the BBC’s first television gardener. The BBC had broadcast gardening talks on the radio from within a few months of its formation in 1922 and Sackville-West was a frequent speaker. She was considered for the role of radio gardener but the job went to an unknown county council horticultural adviser called Mr Middleton. In 1936, he also became the BBC’s first television gardener, working in a purpose-built plot in Alexandra Park, with cable trailed across the road from the palace. He became such a well-known figure that the comic actor, Nelson Keys, impersonated him on television. Keys appeared in a mildewed hat and mangy coat, carrying a dead cat, and making lugubrious pronouncements like ‘the th
istles are doing nicely today’ and ‘add a little fish manure at the earliest opportunity’. The grassy slopes of the park had become an outdoor studio not just for gardening but for sheepdog trials, archery and golf. For one night-time broadcast, they reconstructed the Zeebrugge Raid of 1918 with model boats on the nearby lake.
The historian Ross McKibbin describes British television before the war as ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’. But to its contemporary viewers, it must have seemed more substantial than this. There were now some regular programmes, placemarks in the schedules. Sunday afternoons were for ‘Television Surveys’: outside broadcasts from the International Telephone Exchange at Faraday Buildings or from Watford railway junction to show how locomotives were overhauled and track was relaid. Once a month on Wednesdays the viewer went ‘Down on the Farm’ to see wheat rolling or lambing at Bull Cross Farm which, to keep out the curious hordes, was described as ‘somewhere in the Home Counties’. ‘Does sheep dipping make good television entertainment?’, the Listener’s new television critic, Grace Wyndham Goldie, opened her review of this programme, concluding it with an affirmative.57 Hit West End shows like Magyar Melody, The Desert Song and Me and My Girl were shown live from the theatre, including shots of the crowds in the foyer and the stars in their dressing rooms. Other programmes drew on the sense of viewers as an ad hoc community. A common form of entertainment was the ‘Bee’, a participatory quiz show in which viewers were invited to spell difficult words or whistle ‘Softly awakes my heart’ from beginning to end.