by Joe Moran
Some postwar television personalities were already starting to emerge. Joan Gilbert, the presenter of the revived Picture Page, was an effervescent character prone to stumbling over her lines, laughing for no reason, and saying ‘mmm’ a lot while the interviewee was speaking as if she were preparing for the next question. She was, according to the theatre critic Harold Hobson, ‘rather too boisterous for any but the biggest sets’.10
A tall, bespectacled, gas board official called Leslie Hardern, with a passing resemblance to the ascetic Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, presented Inventors’ Club, introducing back bedroom inventions sent in by viewers. The programme had been born in the economic crisis of September 1947, when Hardern went on holiday to the French Riviera in the last boatload of tourists to leave the country that year without needing government approval. Convinced that new products were needed for an export drive to rescue the country from economic oblivion, Hardern decided to use television to harness British engineering ingenuity. As soon as each programme ended, the BBC would receive enquiries from manufacturers. Mr H. M. Bickle from Ealing, who had invented a hand cream which could be used in place of soap and water by making dirt roll up into small balls and fall off, generated much interest – although it was his cardboard and metal container, ‘the Bickle tube’, that went into production. Mr Gill from Pudsey caused a similar stir with his washing machine that could also wash and dry dishes, peel potatoes and mix dough – but it remained in the prototype stage.11
Other entries to Inventors’ Club – an ‘ionette’ to iron out face wrinkles, a blow-as-you-go foot warmer for those allergic to hot water bottles, an electric dog to scare off burglars, a plughole to make the bath water run away silently without gurgling, a gadget for whisking off bed-clothes – proved, as one critic said, ‘that we are still the race from which sprang Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear’. The brainwaves were a barometer of postwar preoccupations: Hardern received a hundred different versions of a woolwinder submitted by arm-weary husbands of knitters, ninety-six cinder sifters for coal fires and several corporal punishment machines for caning schoolboys. He claimed to have had only one good idea from a woman, an iron with four little retractable legs that served as a stand. Inventors’ Club suggested a growing sense of involvement in the medium among viewers, although there was no need to own a television to contribute, and many of its inventors had never seen it.12
Algernon Blackwood, then nearly eighty, was a favourite on Saturday Night Story. He appeared first in the Halloween broadcast on 1 November 1947, telling a tale, ‘The Curate and the Stockbroker’, in which the stockbroker disappeared. Alarmed viewers rang the switchboard when Blackwood, through the use of two identical chairs and a screen dissolve, was also made to disappear, while his echoing voice remained. Blackwood needed no script and refused to rehearse. He would take the Underground to Wood Green and walk the mile and a half up the hill to the studio, making up the story as he went, emerging out of the darkness and entering for a light dusting of makeup before appearing on camera with moments to spare. He had mastered the art of talking to the individual viewer, greeting them while seated in an armchair, before laying his book aside, taking off his glasses, brushing his eyelids and leaning forward to begin his tale. He told haunting stories based on his years of travel in frontier Canada, the Black Forest and the Danube marshes, and his long absorption in mysticism and magic. He always finished dead on time, though the sharp-eyed viewer might notice his gaze wandering towards the clock overhead.13
‘Here’s Terry-Thomas to help you sell more sets,’ proclaimed an advertisement for Baird televisions in a trade magazine, exhorting retailers to use his face in cinemas to attract more viewers. In How Do You View?, Thomas played a cash-strapped, amiable bounder presenting the show from his bachelor pad. Even on black-and-white sets, his gold-banded Dunhill’s cigarette holder and brocade waistcoat shone. A Picture Post article, ‘The dandy comes back to W.1’, argued that Thomas ‘must be given much of the credit for the return of flowered waistcoats – he will lay you two to one that you cannot stand for three minutes outside the display window of the Piccadilly shop which supplies him with them, without hearing his name mentioned’. He was sent cufflinks, cravats and cummerbunds by viewers, and Thomas aimed the programme very directly at them. ‘I think that if you have an audience in the studio you play to it,’ he explained. ‘The viewer at home becomes just an old auntie watching the show from the side of the stage, instead of being the person the show should be directed straight at.’ At the start of each episode a tight close-up brought his full face on to the screen. ‘How do you view? Are you frightfully well? You are? Oh, good show!’, he would say. The camera went in even tighter on his gap-toothed grin, magically sweeping past the gap and dissolving into the next scene. Seven-year-old Sarah Miles, watching with her family in Essex, sometimes ‘laughed so much that Mummy would scold me for peeing on the sofa cushions’.14
But most loved were the three main announcers: Sylvia Peters, Mary Malcolm and McDonald Hobley, who was also known to viewers as the presenter of the Friday night variety show Kaleidoscope, with its popular segment, ‘Puzzle Corner’. Viewers in a pre-announced town were invited to display a copy of the Radio Times in their front window and the live programme showed an outside broadcast van driving round the streets. ‘It might be here, it might be anywhere,’ Hobley would tantalise viewers, even though the contestant had already been collared by the production team.15 The BBC’s genial light entertainment producer, Ronnie Waldman, conducted the quiz by telephone, with the van parked outside the viewer’s house, the technology being too primitive to film inside it.
Isolated clips of the announcers today, usually from the more formal occasions that have been preserved, suggest stultifyingly starched attire and pronunciation, although Lord Reith always claimed the BBC accent was an improvement on the overly refined Oxford accent (‘theatah, the fahside and such like’) and it aspired to be non-regional rather than class-specific. Contemporary viewers did not think the announcers aloof or formal, for breakdowns were common and their job was to fill in the time reassuringly. Once the interruption went on for so long that Malcolm advised everyone to make a cup of tea and she would call them back if anything happened. Her poodle, Fernandel, sat next to her on a bar stool, and would be told off for yawning while she announced the programmes. ‘In good times and in bad times, through breakdowns, gramophone records and interludes, these people have stood by us with unwavering cheer,’ wrote the television critic Caroline Lejeune. ‘One has felt glad for their sakes when normal transmission was resumed; they are our familiar friends; may we never lose them.’16
In December 1949, The Aeroplane drew attention to a ‘serious hazard’ to aircraft some ten miles north of Birmingham along the Birmingham–Lichfield Road, on a lip of hills overhanging the Midland plain. ‘We advise all pilots to put a red ring on their maps round Sutton Coldfield and keep clear of the area in low visibility,’ the magazine warned.17 The Radio Times twice carried a photo of this 750-foot-high hazard on its cover: first, in July when it wasn’t yet finished, and then in December, when it was. This was a new feature in the landscape, more futuristic even than the mini-Eiffel Tower of Muswell Hill. It was poised like a giant pencil standing on its point, its tapering base resting on a ballbearing smaller than a cricket ball, which nestled in a socket. Since rigid joints were vulnerable to metal fatigue and rust, this hinged bearing allowed the mast to move by up to two feet in high winds, supported by stays in the surrounding fields, as though it were a moored airship.
This mast, wrote the Manchester Guardian, ‘does nothing to besmirch these pleasant wooded hills … Soaring fantastically from a two-inch steel ball on which it is poised, its slender stay-ropes reaching across the fields like the strands of a giant web, it could hardly be regarded by the most ardent rural preserver with anything but admiration and awe’. Norman Collins was still more florid. ‘It is a beautiful sight – that slender, gleaming mast … it is the sort of th
ing that persuades me that, despite all they do to prove the contrary, engineers are artists at heart and, like other artists, have their lyrical moments, their supreme outbursts,’ he wrote. ‘You could stand there speechless and admiring for minutes on end, simply staring up at it as the clouds go cruising past and the aerial itself appears to be sailing off somewhere into Warwickshire.’18
As well as being the controller of BBC television, Collins was a writer and something of an amateur ethnographer, given to extrapolating the hidden life of his viewers from tiny visual clues. This side interest in domestic anthropology was evident in one of his first published pieces, written in 1929, when he was twenty-one, for the News Chronicle. In ‘London from a Bus Stop’, he observed the capital from the top of a double-decker bus late one afternoon, watching lights go on in the windows of rows of suburban houses, blinds being drawn and ‘the tired city clerk push open the little gate of his small front garden and put his latchkey into his front-door’. In 1945 he had published a sprawling, bestselling novel called London Belongs to Me. ‘If you start walking westwards in the early morning from somewhere down in Wapping or the Isle of Dogs,’ he wrote in its preface, ‘by evening you will still be on the march, still in the midst of shabby little houses – only somewhere over by Hammersmith by then.’19 In the novel, Collins gradually reduces this immense, everyday sameness to readability through the intricate lives of his characters and their chance encounters with each other.
When he became controller of television in 1947, Collins retained this desire to imagine mass society and what was going on in those ‘shabby little houses’. His office on the top floor of Alexandra Palace was like an eyrie, with a bay window out of which he could see the endless rows of redbrick north London artisans’ villas arranged in parallel lines. He had a television in the office and when it was on, he would look out of his window and practise his ‘stout Cortez act’ by ‘gazing with a wild surmise into the blue’, wondering who else in this immense city might be watching too.20
Whenever he journeyed back to London on the train, Collins’s spirits rose when he looked out of the window and saw the new pattern of H-shaped aerials peppering the skyline: ‘Row upon row of small houses, where a year or so ago there was nothing to be seen but the usual huddle of cowls and chimney-pots, now carry these queer antennae on their rooftops as though every home were displaying some new brand of talisman.’ His excitement, he wrote, stemmed from the fact that he felt he knew something about the life that went on in the homes beneath the aerials, and could almost spirit himself inside to look at the family sitting in front of the set, a sort of ‘ghost across the suburbs’ peering over 100,000 different shoulders at everything from Shakespeare plays to cookery demonstrations. On a trip to Sutton Coldfield just before the transmitter opened, Collins spotted a small cottage with a green gate and an aerial sticking out just above the eaves. He found himself touched by this ‘simple act of faith’ in anticipation of ‘that magical moment on December 17 when the box in the corner is going to spring into life’.21
Collins was a populist who, before moving to television, had headed the new Light Programme on radio, launching well-loved programmes like Dick Barton – Special Agent, Housewives’ Choice and Have a Go! He was a great champion of the newer medium, soon to resign in frustration at the low priority given to it by the BBC, to become a key player in the development of ITV. A large part of his job, he felt, was to persuade the people in the modest villas he saw spread out before him to go to the radio dealers and put down a deposit on a television set. In 1950, shortly after resigning his post, he rebuked T. S. Eliot, who, after returning from the US where ‘the television habit’ was now entrenched, had written to The Times to express his apprehension. Collins’s response was that seventeenth-century Puritans had been anxious about the theatre-going habit, and Victorians about the novel-reading habit. Eliot’s fears were ‘merely anti-Caxtonism brought up to date’.22
The Sutton Coldfield mast opened just before Christmas 1949. At 7.55 p.m. on Saturday 17 December, viewers waited in vain for the tuning picture as McDonald Hobley said they were ‘having a bit of trouble’, and an empty screen eventually dissolved to show Sylvia Peters in Birmingham, apologetically welcoming the Midlands into the TV family. There followed a variety revue from the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, featuring Stanley Holloway and Jolly ‘Dynamite’ Jefferson, and a game of ice hockey between Earls Court Rangers and Nottingham Panthers from the Empress Hall, London. ‘The interim programme with music, showing the course of a river from source to sea, was done with painted backcloths and seemed both slow and dull,’ said the Manchester Guardian. However, it conceded, ‘a talk on “Gates”, warning the child about the dangers of leaving gates open in the country, was attractively done’.23
Some thought the spread of television should not be a priority in these austere times. The general secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union criticised the policy of ‘TV cake for all’ while there was a shortage of telephones. It was absurd, he said, that a family within seventy miles of Birmingham could sit in comfort and watch a cabaret show in London but would have to search for a red telephone box to call a doctor a couple of miles away. The telephone famine, he feared, might not end for another twenty years.24 He was overly optimistic: in 1972, 200,000 people were still on the waiting list for telephones.
But such dissenting voices were rare. The first Sutton Coldfield broadcast went far beyond its intended range. Pictures reached a busy main road in Moss Side in the south of Manchester, and the southern suburbs of Liverpool, although nearer the centre the traffic got in the way of reception. At Thorne in Yorkshire, eighty miles from the mast, an audience of 200 watched a single set in the town hall, with only slight interference from passing buses and a nearby fridge. Eric Foulkes, a radio engineer in Rhyl, reported that the pictures had made it all the way over the Clwydian hills and were only spoiled by flashes caused by car ignitions. At 7 a.m. the following morning, a Sunday, George Samways, a Cheadle Hulme radio dealer, was woken by a telephone call from a man who had seen television the previous night on a communal set and wanted his own set installed straightaway. By lunchtime, twenty more people had phoned with orders, too eager to wait until Samways’s shop opened on Monday.25
The opening of a new transmitter tended to revive the habit of communal viewing. A Midlands viewer was watching the 1950 FA Cup Final at home when he was interrupted by two callers who asked if they could join him, and who said they belonged to a larger group that had split up and gone in search of television aerials. When a boxing match was televised from Birmingham, there were similar groups roaming the city’s streets and willing to pay admission money, about two shillings and sixpence being the going rate, to enter houses with aerials.26
‘Already some two millions are held nightly by our modern Ancient Mariner, spellbinding in its darkened corner,’ wrote Fyfe Robertson in the Picture Post in February 1951. ‘This newest bread-and-circus toy is irresistible. Though it will not replace tallow candles in the official index, it will join the pools in the unofficial cost of living.’ Robertson conjectured hopefully that it would create ‘a rounded understanding of common interests in the baffling world of human endeavour … Television could most tellingly remind us that duodenal ulcers and young love and dandruff and the way we feel after a good meal are much the same everywhere.’27 Robertson was wrong on one point. Five years later, televisions and replacement cathode ray tubes did replace tallow candles in the retail price index, together with other items no longer in everyday use, such as rabbits, turnips and distemper. In 1957, the rise of television was also decisive in the demise of that once best-selling photojournalism magazine, Picture Post, and Robertson had to find alternative employment as a reporter on BBC television’s Tonight.
Working out where the new television masts were to go was much more complicated than simply picking the highest hills in the most populated areas. Unlike light, which travels only in straight lines, electromagnetic waves behave in
strange and stubborn ways, bending round obstacles or bumps in the landscape, passing through trees, buildings and even hills, and reaching further than normal during electrical storms or other freak conditions in the upper atmosphere. Areas immediately below the transmitter can also suffer from signal ‘passover’, when the line-of-sight radio waves fail to percolate downwards quickly enough from the high ground. Even the subsoil can affect reception: granite, for instance, forms a blanket under the earth that traps the radio waves. The first sign of television’s arrival in an area was, therefore, the sight of captive balloons, with TV aerials attached, suddenly appearing on likely hilltops and escarpment edges, while a BBC van travelled round the area seeing how far the test signals could reach.
This is how a union flag and a BBC flag came to be flying above a soaring new mast at Holme Moss in the Pennines, 1,700 feet above sea level on the border between Derbyshire and Yorkshire. It was a lonely spot where only sheep, their fleeces grimy from the industrial breezes coming over from Manchester, grazed obliviously. ‘The giant stays which hold it, tethered to their concrete bases, stride away between the banks of the black moss for all the world like one of Wells’s Martian machines arrested in mid-career,’ wrote the Manchester Guardian. ‘The mast itself from a little distance looks as fragile and filigree and ten times more dramatic than the Skylon.’28
The Skylon was the starkly modern, cigar-shaped metal folly erected on London’s South Bank for the Festival of Britain earlier that year. Like the new breed of tethered TV mast, it had a steel lattice-work frame supported on cables, so that it seemed to float above the ground – the joke being that, like the UK economy, it had no visible means of support. Posters and mugs of the Skylon became collectors’ items and it was used to promote the biro, the new pen it allegedly resembled. Holme Moss, which similarly seemed to float above the earth and was also spectacular when lit up at night with warning lights, generated a similar excitement.