by Joe Moran
Broadcasters had long been aware of the power they held to synchronise human behaviour in remarkable ways. As early as 1935 Lord Reith noted that engineers could gauge the popularity of radio programmes by the drop in water consumption and the sudden peak load when they ended. In the mid 1950s they began to notice a similar effect in television, when Children’s Hour – especially when a cultish, anarchic glove puppet called Sooty, his ears darkened with soot to show up on black-and-white TV, was on – seriously depleted electricity supplies, because it started at 5 p.m. and overlapped with the working day. The Electricity Board estimated that, if the BBC would only shift the programme half an hour forward, it would save the equivalent of a full power station on peak demand.3
The ending of popular shows placed a particular strain on the National Grid, because the electricity used in running TVs was small compared to the much greater amounts needed to operate lights, electric kettles and water pumps for flushing toilets. No longer did people open the fridge door or make a pot of tea as a matter of individual whim; television immobilised them all for set periods before springing them into life when a programme ended. Surges in demand of half a million kilowatts, the output of a large power station, could occur at the end of certain shows, threatening the knife-edge balance of the country’s electricity supply. Thus, after the catastrophic impact of Wagon Train on Wimbledon, was a new yardstick created for assessing the popularity of TV programmes.
To avert a similar disaster in future, the Electricity Board began employing statisticians to track the popularity of television programmes and to trace demand curves across each evening. These half a dozen men, the ‘demand forecasters’, would sit in the new national control room in Park Street, London, leafing through copies of the Radio Times and TV Times. One of their jobs was to map the ‘TV pickup’, the peak moment at which millions of people stopped watching television. It was a phenomenon felt most strongly in Britain, with its relatively few commercial breaks and large number of tea drinkers boiling electric kettles – unlike, for example, the Japanese, who used gas stoves.
In the control room the forecasters would monitor demand, relying on a mixture of intuition and experience, and instruct Britain’s power stations to increase or reduce production accordingly. By the mid 1960s, computers had been introduced, enabling the impact of factors such as peak-hour viewing, mealtimes and seasonal changes to be accurately assessed. The computers would then issue instructions and, seconds later, vast turbines would rumble into life like waking monsters, just to maintain the state of electricity in the grid at the magical frequency of fifty cycles a second. For television was now a basic amenity, like electric light or tap water, that people expected to have at the flick of a switch. In seven British homes out of ten, a bluish-grey flicker radiated through the front windows each night.
Engineers had been trying for years to get television’s high frequency radio waves to travel over longer distances and somehow override the curvature of the earth. In the late 1940s, they floated the idea of carrying TV transmitters high up in the air on tethered airships, barrage balloons, or aeroplanes travelling in lazy circles 30,000 feet above the earth, sending out signals that would blanket the earth’s surface like giant, upended ice-cream cones. Another more audacious plan was to bounce radio waves off the surface of the moon. In May 1959, in an experiment sponsored by the television manufacturer Pye, the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire sent morse code messages to the Cambridge Air Force Base in Massachusetts by this method. But the reception was poor and the signals could not be sent once the moon had set. The start of the space age intervened and on 10 July 1962, the Telstar satellite set off round the earth on an egg-shaped orbit, during which it would be visible on both sides of the Atlantic for just one hour. Several million viewers stayed up after midnight to watch a special broadcast from Goonhilly Downs on Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula, not far from where Marconi had first sent his radio waves across the Atlantic.
Goonhilly, a sparse heathland at Britain’s most southerly point, could almost have been designed for satellite broadcasts by a benevolent god familiar with the nature of the radio wave. During the war it had been home to RAF Drytree, which provided radar cover for Britain’s Western Approaches, as it offered a sweeping view from horizon to horizon – which now allowed Telstar to be tracked easily as it raced across the sky in low orbit. It was away from industrial interference and radio noise: ‘electronically quiet’, in engineer speak. And on the Lizard peninsula, an old sea bed lifted 400 feet above the waves, the Precambrian rock is made up mainly of serpentine, on which little grows except Erica Vagans, a heathland plant unique in its tolerance of magnesium in stony soil. There are thus few trees or bushes to block the path of the TV signal. Serpentine is also hard enough to bear the thousand-tonne weight of the giant satellite dish built to pick up Telstar’s signal.
Drawn by a sense of history in the making, crowds of Lizard locals and holidaymakers had pitched their tents and started camp fires near the floodlit dish, jamming their cars along the narrow lanes leading on to the moors. At 12.45 a.m. viewers on both BBC and ITV heard the voice of the Post Office engineer, John Bray, stationed at Goonhilly, saying that the huge dish had begun tracking, searching the skies along the predicted orbit for Telstar’s signal. Bray had long been excited by television’s ability to communicate over long distances. In the late 1920s, as a teenage engineering apprentice in Portsmouth’s naval dockyards, he had built his own version of Baird’s spinning disc receiver to pick up the thirty-line images from the BBC’s mast on Selfridge’s roof over sixty miles away, and a decade before Telstar, he had secured his footnote in television history by inventing the TV detector van. Bray had spent eighteen months overseeing the building of Goonhilly Earth Station. Although Telstar’s most profitable line would be taking international phone calls, he knew it was satellite television that would excite the public. But as the public watched, Goonhilly’s TV screens were picking up only static. The steerable dish searched the skies in vain for a signal that was as weak as that which would be received from a one-bar electric fire on the moon.
Then, at around 1 a.m., viewers saw a TV flicker tantalisingly into life, and a fuzzy image move manically up the screen as an engineer tried to tune it in. ‘That’s a man’s face …,’ spluttered the BBC’s commentator Raymond Baxter. ‘That’s the picture … there it is. It’s a man … there is the first live television picture across the Atlantic with rather less than four minutes of available time left.’ Over on ITV, Ian Trethowan floundered in similar fashion: ‘Something is … there’s a picture there … there is something different there. It looks like a face. It is a face. This is almost certainly, this is the first television picture to come across the Atlantic. It’s a face. Madly fiddling with it or trying to, trying to hold it, just like you would at home. But this is … this is a face. It’s bouncing around but you can see absolutely clearly this is a man, sitting behind a desk.’ The face settled for a few seconds before vanishing. An aerospace firm placed an advertisement in several newspapers, showing the screen capture: ‘Do not adjust your set: THIS IS ONE OF THE GREATEST TV PICTURES EVER! … the Hawker Siddeley Group is proud to have supplied much of the tracking equipment.’4 It was indeed a blurred image of a besuited, bespectacled man sitting behind a desk: Fred Kappel, chairman of Telstar’s funder, AT&T.
Somehow the precariousness of the satellite connection, the faint, wobbly image of a head appearing out of nowhere being interrupted by capering wavy lines, added to the sense of enchantment. For those with a living-room aerial, adjusting it was a long, nightly ritual, and viewers were well used to twiddling the vertical hold button on their sets just as the Goonhilly engineer had done to tune in Fred Kappel. Reception was still a hit or miss affair. Everything from faulty electric blankets to hairdryers caused interference. A feature of the urban landscape at this time was the construction cranes assembling high-rise buildings, which produced ghost images on TV sets. Prince Philip, attending the congre
ss of the International Union of Architects in London, complained to representatives of a building firm that their new eighteen-storey building in Victoria Street was interfering with his viewing of the Test Match.5 Metal gasometers also stopped the TV signal getting through, although less so in the evenings, when their iron tanks sank back down as they released gas to homes.
Even televisions close to a transmitter were prone to getting pictures in negative form, known to engineers as the ‘Penge Pub Effect’ because it was first identified in a public house near the new Crystal Palace mast soon after it opened in 1956. Now that most of the country had television, poor reception had replaced no reception as a common grievance. Early one Sunday morning in April 1961, Reginald Bevins, Postmaster General and MP for Toxteth, was asleep in his house in Queens Drive, Liverpool when he was awakened by a loud banging on the front door. His teenage son, sent to answer it, was confronted by a hundred television viewers from Peterborough who had driven 200 miles in a nine-van convoy to protest to him about the poor reception they were getting for ITV. They had brought a petition with nearly 20,000 signatures.6
Telstar had its own power system and onboard computer to retransmit the signal it received. This little space postman, not much bigger than a beach ball, seemed almost human and rather vulnerable, a tiny dot in the emptiness of space. At the Earls Court Radio Show, a working model of Telstar revolved above a miniature Lizard peninsula bathed ‘in a wondrous green twilight like something out of a Chesterton story, as if the Flying Inn were just on the other side of Goonhilly,’ as one visitor put it. The Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, wrote a playful concrete poem, ‘Unscrambling the waves at Goonhilly’, in the form of a Telstar transmission which relays the names of real and imaginary aquatic creatures – dogfish, sardine, sardock, telfish – before identifying the magical, similarly seven-lettered name of the satellite itself.7 Two weeks after the launch of Telstar, more than half the population of Britain watched a live link-up between Europe and America which began with a short segment of a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, and ended with Eamonn Andrews balancing upon the rocks of the Lizard and a London bus passing over a floodlit bridge on the shimmering Thames.
On the night of 10 July, the record producer Joe Meek had been watching television alone in his flat-cum-recording studio above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road, London. Now a twenty-four-hour off licence next door to the Titanic Café, it has a small round plaque nailed to its first floor wall, next to a satellite dish, which says: ‘The Telstar Man Lived, Worked and Died Here.’ Meek had long been fascinated by the capacity of radio waves to send magic rays invisibly through space. In 1948, at the age of nineteen, he had completed his national service as a mechanic at radar installations in the West Country, putting in long, lonely shifts in one-room buildings perched on isolated hills, directing his gaze and imagination skywards. When still in his teens he had built a nine-inch television set, the first in his home town of Newent on the edge of the Forest of Dean, although, since there was still no nearby TV mast, all it gave out was white noise.
In 1950 he went to work at an electrical shop in Newent, repairing TV sets, a steady job in those days when sets were unreliable. He built another TV for his parents, ready for the first transmissions from Wenvoe in 1952. ‘It was a little 12″ screen,’ his brother Eric remembered. ‘And it used to come on about half past seven at night, and we’d all get in there in the dark, draw all the curtains, switch it on and sit there till the Epilogue at about 12 o’clock. And when we put the lights on, the house was full – chock-a-block, full of people! They just used to sneak through the door and nobody said a word.’8 Meek came to London and serviced TVs in a radio shop on Edgware Road, before moving into record producing. He became increasingly unstable, dabbling in the occult and conducting séances to contact the spirit of Buddy Holly. Something of a late Victorian, he had made an imaginative association between the ability of humans to commune with each other through electrical wires and radio waves and the slightly older practice of telepathy.
Past midnight on 10 July, Meek sat on his sofa, enthralled by the television picture of Fred Kappel at his desk. After reluctantly going to bed, he lay there imagining Telstar orbiting several thousand miles above the earth. A tune gradually came into his head – something evocative of the speed of this little satellite and the vast distances it was covering – and he ran straight to his studio to hum it on to a tape.9 Later that week, he recorded his instrumental, ‘Telstar’, with the Tornados. The deathless tune, played on a clavioline, conveyed the sense of a countdown, blast-off and ascent into the skies, followed by a plateauing guitar break evoking orbit. Meek passed the tape through compressors and echo chambers to make the sound echoey and uncanny. By the beginning of October the single had reached number one, where it stayed for four weeks. Its rinky-dink catchiness and ethereal strangeness seemed a fitting soundtrack for this new age of television. A rumour spread that the background noises on the track came from recording Telstar’s launch and its aural signal in space. In fact, the rocket launch sound at the start was Meek’s toilet flushing played in reverse, and the sound evoking radio waves was a pencil scraping against an ashtray.
In her Christmas TV broadcast, the Queen used Telstar as a metaphor for a world changing almost too rapidly. ‘This tiny satellite has become the invisible focus of a million eyes,’ she said, striking an oddly melancholic note. ‘Yet some people are uncertain which star to follow, or if any star is worth following at all. What is it all for, they ask, if you can bounce … a television picture through the skies and across the world, yet still find lonely people living in the same street? The wise men of old followed a star: modern man has built one.’
Marshall McLuhan, the modish cultural theorist on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s, argued that, with the arrival of electronic media, we were seeing a revival of tribal humanity, a return to the archaic world of orality in contrast to the privatised, abstracted world of print, which he called, in the title of a book published in the year of Telstar, The Gutenberg Galaxy. A Catholic convert, he wrote quasi-religiously of the new global media creating ‘a general cosmic consciousness’ and a ‘unified sensorium’.10 McLuhan often appeared on television, his intellectual style – synoptic, scatty, epigrammatic – being well suited to it. He seemed the perfect prophet for the space age, which briefly revived that earlier delight in television’s ability to annihilate physical distance and watch remote events in real time.
But the space-age glamour of satellite television was fleeting. Telstar’s successors did not career round the earth in a low oval orbit, from where their beeping progress could be eagerly tracked. They were parked in a geostationary orbital garage called the Clarke Belt, named after the sci-fi writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke. In an article in Wireless World in 1945, Clarke had first located this region, 23,300 miles above the equator, where satellites could circle the spinning earth in exactly twenty-four hours and so remain stationary above it. Here, unlike Telstar, the satellites would be mostly forgotten. As President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed Europe live at 7 p.m. on 7 May 1965 via Early Bird, the first satellite to be placed in such an orbit, Michael Miles carried on regardless on ITV’s Take Your Pick as he had done for a decade, offering contestants money for the key to a box which might contain a star prize or some bread and dripping (‘I’ll give you four pounds for that, five, six, seven – look, there might be a boiled egg in that box …’) while the studio audience shouted advice (‘Open the box!’, ‘Take the money!’). On Tonight on BBC1, they showed a brief clip of LBJ before moving on to a film about the Land of the Midnight Sun. Another Tornados’ single, ‘Early Bird’, also written and produced by Joe Meek, failed to trouble the pop charts.
A special Early Bird simulcast from New York was another damp squib. ‘The nearest approach to live visual novelty that I saw was the corpse of an elderly baseball fan being carried out of the vast Astrodome at Houston,’ wrote one TV critic. The
same was true of Our World, a mammoth satellite link-up in June 1967 in which nineteen different nations presented segments, remembered now only for the Beatles singing ‘All You Need is Love’. ‘As we switched from pictures of cars streaming back into Paris on a summer evening to the enthralling spectacle of an iron and steel works in Linz,’ wrote Michael Billington in The Times, ‘I was reminded of the melancholy truism that modern man has at his disposal fantastic power of communication and very little to say.’11
Even when Telstar launched, sceptical voices pointed out that American television was already here, and that seeing it instantly might not advance the cause of civilisation. Richard Dimbleby, hosting the Telstar broadcast, wryly observed that satellite TV would mean ‘instant Laramie’. And Telstar began its life in space just as, back on earth, the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting was criticising the ‘vapid and puerile’ programmes on American-style commercial TV. It identified triviality as ‘a natural vice of television’ and (quoting the Christian socialist historian R. H. Tawney) as ‘more dangerous to the soul than wickedness’. The committee examined the offerings of the six TV stations in New York on a winter evening, and found, to its chagrin, a choice of six westerns between 7.30 p.m. and 9 p.m.12