by Joe Moran
The Radio Times presented television as a domestic entertainment but a social one, and urged viewers to hold television parties for their non-viewing friends. The magazine tried to draw on the growing sense of camaraderie among this group of pioneers. ‘A week or two ago I was introduced to a neighbour of mine,’ wrote the regular television columnist, ‘the Scanner’. ‘We talked sweet nothings until I said as a brother-viewer I was glad to see his roof was graced with a television aerial. A reaction of delight was immediate; it was like the meeting of two anglers.’ After Edgar Charloe from Acton wrote to suggest founding a society of viewers, the Scanner reflected that ‘there must be hundreds of viewers in that thickly populated suburb who feel the same way as he does’. The Radio Times liked to identify celebrities with televisions, such as the cartoonist David Low, the dance band leader Henry Hall and the comedian Will Hay. It awarded the title of oldest viewer to 91-year-old Mr E. C. Rolls of Walton-on-Thames, who had dim memories of the Crimean War and who, after seeing Noel Coward’s Hay Fever on Christmas night 1938, was hooked.58
The magazine also unearthed a farmhand from Long Melford, Suffolk, called George Thomas Boar. After reading in the Radio Times that television was on its way, he had saved up £60, which was doubled by a small legacy, and in the autumn of 1937 had paid 120 guineas for a TV set, even though he lived fifty miles from Muswell Hill. Subject to a formal application, he allowed other villagers to come to his cottage and see the programmes for free. About a thousand people, including his farmer-boss, had come to watch in his two-room cottage, giving Long Melford easily the highest proportion of viewers in the country. After she had seen Boar’s television, an 87-year-old woman shook her head and said, ‘It cairn’t be, it cairn’t be.’ Another farmhand sat through a programme composed of literary quotations and said, ‘Those are the items we folks like.’ Boar’s face was ‘alive with mingled pride and enthusiasm as he fondle[d] the television set with all the love which a stockman gives to a new-born calf or a leggy foal’. Television, he said, was the only way of ‘taking part in the exciting life of London’, which he had never seen. Had he lived three centuries ago, the magazine reflected, ‘he would have been burned at the stake as a wizard or a sorcerer in good East Anglian style. But because he lives in the year 1939 he is looked upon for miles around as a fairy godfather who performs miracles.’59
The BBC was starting to flesh out the habits and rituals of this new tribe, the viewers, nearly 900 of whom were already writing regularly to Alexandra Palace about the programmes they had seen. In February and March 1939, the announcers Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell asked viewers to apply to fill in a questionnaire, and over 4,000 – a huge proportion out of about 20,000 set owners – returned them. The survey revealed that viewers loved the announcers; they found extraneous noises of scene-shifting irritating; they thought continental films, operettas and ballets were boring; and they wanted a ‘Children’s Hour’ as on the radio. They mostly disliked items being repeated, although some viewers welcomed this because television was so addictive: ‘We look forward to a repeat of a programme we have already seen, so that we can go out for a walk now and again.’60
One June afternoon in 1939, seventy-five couples, chosen by ballot from the 700 who had applied, attended a ‘television tea party’ at Broadcasting House. Television’s stars – Joan Miller, Jasmine Bligh, Elizabeth Cowell and Leslie Mitchell – wore ‘stop me and ask one’ identity buttons affixed to their coat lapels and handed out smoked salmon sandwiches, cakes and buns. Sitting in the raked, padded seats of the hall, the viewers plied Gerald Cock with questions. ‘Why,’ asked a man at the back, ‘can’t the evening’s programme be given on the screen to save me looking it up in the Radio Times?’ This was a matter for the engineers, replied Cock. ‘Why is it that the television orchestra so often drowns the soloists?’ Cramped studio space, came the answer. ‘Why can’t the morning demonstration film be changed?’ Because it cost £3,000 to make, Cock said. When he mentioned Picture Page, spontaneous applause filled the hall.61
‘Of course Picture Page is our favourite,’ said one woman to Grace Wyndham Goldie, attending for the Listener. ‘And the plays. I do like the plays. Except the Insect Play. I didn’t understand what that was all about. And I don’t like the foreign films they put on sometimes. But the rest’s splendid. It’s all so friendly.’ Goldie noted the enormous popularity of the announcers who also doubled up as interviewers and stunt people, having their palms read by chirologists or being rescued from burning buildings in fire displays. As the admiration for the announcers attested, television was already more informal than radio. Radio conversation at this time was often scripted, and Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s director of talks, complained that many speakers read their scripts in a ‘parsonical drone’. On television, by contrast, the announcers could not read from a script if they wanted to look at the viewer, and could not see much in the glare of the lights anyway, so they had to learn to be natural. Television’s stars, reflected Goldie, would be ‘the people who make direct contact with its small audiences. In other words, they will be the talkers not the actors, the Howard Marshalls not the Clark Gables.’62
With war approaching, Radiolympia in August 1939 was subdued. The main attraction was ‘Television Avenue’, a township of stands along which hundreds of different makes of set were arrayed. Mr Middleton tended a life-sized recreation of his Alexandra Palace garden and there was a huge model of the palace, sixty-five feet high, with miniature cameras and other equipment inside, like a giant doll’s house. The radio trade predicted that 100,000 sets would be in homes by Christmas.63
Programmes remained light until the end: an alternative reality radiating from the northern heights. At Radiolympia on 1 September, with Germany having invaded Poland earlier that morning, Elizabeth Cowell interviewed the Misses Reilly on ‘all year round bathing’ and Mr J. McIntyre on ‘impressions of English life as seen by a West Indian’, and Joe Loss and his band played ‘If I had a talking picture of you’. As the evacuation of schoolchildren held up traffic out of London, a Disney cartoon, Mickey’s Gala Premiere, was shown in full (and not, as legend has it, breaking up into static halfway through). Some test signals followed and, at around 12.35 p.m., closedown. The Radio Times, which went on sale that day, fleshed out the programmes for the coming week: a ‘television fashion display’, a programme about swans in literature, art and music which ‘will be frankly highbrow, so don’t switch on if your appreciation of bird life is limited to Donald Duck’, and ‘Interest Film: West of Inverness’. But a special issue of Radio Times issued three days later entitled ‘Broadcasting Carries On!’, made no mention of television at all.64 The first casualty of war was the TV listings.
By October, as the phoney war dragged on, the BBC had received hundreds of letters asking for television to resume. ‘Most of the letters say that, having got used to television, owners of now useless sound and vision receivers find that ordinary sound programmes are unsatisfying and not worth switching on to hear,’ said a speaker at the AGM of Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd in December. ‘With the present conditions prevailing in the London area, particularly at night, there is a real need for television.’65 The BBC’s stock reply was that television had been withdrawn for reasons of national security, the characteristic sound of the Alexandra Palace transmitter making it useful as a direction finding point for enemy aircraft. Most of the television engineers went to work developing radar, and those who remained to look after Alexandra Palace deployed its sound transmitter in what Winston Churchill named the ‘battle of the beams’, using it to jam the high-frequency radio waves which German bombers used to guide themselves on to targets. The only people watching television in Britain during the war were members of British intelligence, tuning in to German TV broadcasts drifting over from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
The BBC Handbook for 1940 plaintively recounted a brief, golden hour it was not sure would return. ‘To talk of the television programmes during those last
eight months of the service is to stir wistful memories,’ wrote the BBC press officer, Ernest Thomson, as Britain entered its darkest days of the war. ‘We throw a glance nowadays at the blank screens of our receivers and remember when they held us like a spell. We recall the constantly changing scene: Royal processions, tennis at Wimbledon, comedies and thrillers in the studios, the big fights at Harringay and Earl’s Court, the living portraits of “Picture Page” … and we ask with Keats, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” … One day, we may hope that eager striving band of specialists will reassemble under their queer, futuristic mast in Alexandra Park to resume the world’s first high-definition television service. But whether that happens soon or late, we had our glorious hour. Television was here – You Couldn’t Shut Your Eyes to It.’66
3
A STRAIGHT PENCIL-MARK UP THE SKY
A day in bed … Watched television with Joyce and Cole. What a hideous and horrid invention.
Noel Coward, 4 January 19471
On Saturday 6 October 1945, Nella Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness, decided to make the most of the last weekend before the clocks went back for winter by making a shopping expedition to Kendal. ‘I saw my first television set but was not very thrilled,’ she confided to her diary, written for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. ‘The screen was so tiny any performers would have looked like dolls.’ Nella was looking through a shop window at a dead screen. Broadcasts had not yet resumed after the end of the war and, even if they had, the signal would not have reached the Lake District from Alexandra Palace. ‘To most people with pre-war television sets, and many who hoped to be viewers in the near future, the year opened in delicious mystery,’ wrote the BBC Yearbook of 1946, ‘but viewers-to-be were wondering what was really happening beneath that spindly, bristling aerial-mast on London’s northern heights.’2
It was not until 7 June 1946, a year after VE Day, that television returned, just in time to broadcast the Victory Parade. At twenty-one years old, Miss Beryl Romaril, of Grenoble Gardens, Palmers Green, gained brief renown as the vision mixer at Alexandra Palace who was to turn the knob that faded up the first pictures for six years. The newspaper headline, ‘Beryl to turn on television: 20,000 are waiting’, probably overestimated the viewing figures. On that first night, the BBC showed a dramatic adaptation of a piece of French resistance underground fiction called The Silence of the Sea about an elderly man and his niece in occupied France forced to take in as a lodger a cultured German officer (Kenneth More), who talked about his desire for friendship between their two nations. After a trip to Paris he returned disillusioned with Nazism and left to fight on the Eastern Front, saying he was ‘off to Hell’. ‘It was a very touching and moving play,’ remembered Peter Sallis, then a RADA student watching it on his parents’ set in Leigh-on-Sea, ‘and many years later when I was working with Kenny More, I told him I had seen it and he could hardly believe it. I think I was the only person, apart from close members of his family, who had ever seen The Silence of the Sea.’3
A slight exaggeration: Iain Logie Baird, television curator at the National Media Museum in Bradford, estimates that about 3,000 sets were lost to the Luftwaffe’s bombs, and a few more refused to work after hibernating for so long, so there were perhaps about 15,000 working televisions. John Logie Baird, Iain’s grandfather, had died of a coronary thrombosis on 14 June 1946, aged 58, a week after television resumed, an event that he had been excitedly anticipating. It was his company that had successfully shown the BBC pictures of the Victory Parade on big screens at the Savoy and Grosvenor House Hotels, but Baird was too ill to attend. He died at his rented home on Station Road in Bexhill-on-Sea, outside of the range of television. Even when television did reach the Sussex coast in the early 1950s, reception in Baird’s old street was said to be terrible.4 After its reopening, television received scant coverage in the thin, paper-rationed newspapers of the time, and its performers must often have felt, like Kenneth More, that they were speaking into a void. New television sets started to be made again in the autumn of 1946, but shortages of wood for the cabinets and glass for the cathode ray tubes severely limited production.
On 10 February 1947, in the middle of the harshest winter anyone could remember and an acute coal shortage, television was cancelled for over a month. ‘I am assured on reliable authority,’ wrote John Ware of Chelsea, one of the few aggrieved set owners, in a letter to The Times, ‘that the total power consumption of a whole day’s television transmission is approximately equal to that of one hour of any one of the sound broadcast transmissions.’ But most of the country was far more worried about the rationing of the use of fires and stoves than a television service limited to a few hours a day and to the south-east of England. ‘Last evening I and W went into the Sparks, next door, to wish them a Happy New Year and to look at their television picture of the Cinderella pantomime,’ wrote an underwhelmed Herbert Brush, a retired electricity board inspector living in Sydenham with two female housemates, in his Mass Observation diary on New Year’s Day 1948. ‘My eyes are not good enough to see such a small picture well, but as, according to the announcer, it was the first time they have televised a theatre with its own light, perhaps I did not see the television under the best conditions.’5
The first intimation that television might be waking from its long period of torpor came with the London Olympics in the summer of 1948. Since most sporting events refused permission to film, until then television had been reduced to showing tug-of-war, Japanese sword-play, ping-pong and amateur football from Barnet. There were huge attendances for live sport since, with rationing still in place, rising disposable income tended to be spent on leisure. But the public’s sporting tastes were domestic: league football, horse racing and county cricket. That summer’s big event was Don Bradman’s farewell tour of England in the Ashes. The Olympics, an international event that happened to be staged in Britain, was not anticipated with much relish.
Yet viewers soon found themselves caring about the fate of little-known athletes competing in unfamiliar events. The new Emitron cameras had a revolving lens turret with a close-up, medium-range and long shot, so they could follow runners all the way round the track. They were nearly as sensitive as the human eye, making outside broadcasts possible even in fading light, although the picture then tended to peel off from the corners like a sepia-tinted photograph. Viewers saw clear, velvety images of the giant Jamaican RAF war hero, ‘Art’ Wint, pounding the ground in grief after pulling a muscle and losing his team the 400 metres relay; the housewife and mother, Fanny Blankers-Koen, bringing victory for Holland in the 100 metres relay with her last stride; and the exhausted Belgian Étienne Gailly being heartbreakingly overtaken on the marathon’s final lap. Even better pictures came from the Empire Pool, where swimmers were brought before the Emitrons still breathless and wet. The BBC’s director general, William Haley, lukewarm about the new medium, was staying in a hotel in Devon and was astonished to overhear new arrivals from London talking animatedly about having seen the games on television in their homes.6
A programme called Viewers’ Vote on Saturday evenings invited them to pass judgement on six selected programmes and send in a postcard. Of about a thousand postcards sent in each week, most rated all six programmes, suggesting a great deal of ‘block viewing’. Viewers had stronger and more polarised reactions than radio listeners did to programmes, probably because it was harder for block viewers to tune out things they did not like. Ninety-one per cent of viewers watched the whole evening’s broadcast from 8.30 p.m. to closedown at 10.15 p.m. Few radio programmes drew TV owners away from the set. The nearest things to a dilemma of choice were Have a Go with Wilfred Pickles on Wednesday nights and the comedy series ITMA on Thursday nights.7
The BBC’s conclusions about this block viewing were worthy of the high-minded ideals of its first director general, John Reith. The problem with radio, concluded its researchers, was ‘the difficulty of persuading listeners to keep their fingers f
rom the tuning knob long enough for the programme to secure an entering wedge upon their attention’. Television, by contrast, might be able to ‘enlist the interest of its public in new or unfamiliar fields’. When Mass Observation did a survey of prospective television owners in the spring of 1949, some thought that concentrated viewing in a semi-darkened room was better than absent-minded radio listening, while others worried that it required too total a commitment. ‘There are so many things I can do in my leisure time while listening to and enjoying the wireless, for example, reading, carving and modelling, gardening,’ said a 32-year-old school teacher. ‘I am so afraid that television would prove so attractive that my spare time would be spent straining my eyes looking into a fixed distance screen.’8
Nella Last was not alone, then, among non-viewers in complaining that the nine-by-seven-inch screens were too small, a belief probably encouraged by the large Perspex magnifying glasses attached to some of them and the fact that people often saw them neck-craning among a jostling crowd on the pavement outside a radio shop. But this was not a complaint heard from television owners. ‘This supposed shortcoming of television is voiced only by those who are not viewers,’ John Swift assured potential set buyers in his book Adventures in Vision, ‘and who base their assumptions on an inspection of a “dead”, white screen in a shop window.’ Like Nella Last, two-thirds of Britons had never even seen a television working. An image of the Alexandra Palace mast was now shown every night on the opening credits of Television Newsreel, its pulsing signals seeming to broadcast to the whole world to the tune of a confident wartime march, Charles Williams’s ‘Girls in Grey’. But the chalk hills of the Chilterns and the North Downs still formed a natural barrier against these signals, albeit a permeable one. The BBC’s one known viewer in the Channel Islands reported pictures of ‘excellent entertainment value’.9