Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Read Free Book Online

waves would shoot up, straight through the earth’s atmosphere and into outer space. The horizontal waves would shoot outwards at the height of the transmitter, rather like a lighthouse beam trained on the horizon, and reach about as far as the eye could see from the mast.
    London spreads out along the wide flood plain of the Thames valley, so high ground close to the centre of the city was in short supply. There were two possible sites for a mast, to the south and north: Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill, where Baird already had a mast, and Alexandra Palace. Crystal Palace was the more prestigious address: viewable from eight counties, it was London’s Eiffel Tower, and a homeowner’s test of a good outlook was that ‘you can see the Palace from here’. But the BBC chose its northern cousin because north Londoners, who were more prosperous and more likely to buy televisions, would get a better signal from it, and the coaches carrying performers and producers from Broadcasting House would take just twenty minutes to arrive. It turned out to be a wise choice. On the night of 30 November 1936, the staff of the fledgling television service watched aghast from the esplanade along Alexandra Palace’s southern face as Crystal Palace burned to the ground along with the Baird television transmitter, the flames making a red glare in the sky that could be seen for miles around.

    The move to Alexandra Palace coincided with the annual ‘Radiolympia’ show at the Olympia exhibition centre in Earls Court, held in early autumn at the start of the wireless season when people bought sets for the indoor months. A fraught message arrived at Alexandra Palace that hardly anyone was buying televisions, not unreasonably when nothing was being broadcast on them, and the radio industry was suffering from poor sales. So with just nine days’ notice the television service was told to begin broadcasting from 26 August, to coincide with Radiolympia’s opening day. Engineers started tests on 12 August and for the next fortnight a tiny number of viewers saw Leslie Mitchell, a pencil-moustachioed former actor already christened a ‘Television Adonis’ by the
Daily Mail
, talking off the top of his head to the camera. The new medium was simply filling time, a complaint that has echoed through the decades. But the television critic Kenneth Baily, watching Mitchell on one of the few commercial sets, reflected years later that ‘the gagging act he did then, talking attractively about nothing in particular so that we kept the machine switched on, has never been surpassed on television’. 33
    At 11.45 a.m. on Wednesday 26 August 1936, BBC television broadcast the smooth sounds of Duke Ellington’s ‘Solitude’ accompanied by a test card. At noon, Olympia’s doors opened. Hundreds of people jostled to get inside the seatless, darkened viewing booths, black-draped boxes reminiscent of Victorian peep shows, or they perched on tiered seats in front of television sets in the main foyer like a theatre audience, to see the programme coming from ten miles away on the northern heights. The first broadcast, a variety show with a tuxedoed male voice trio called the Three Admirals and a pantomime horse called Pogo, began with Helen McKay singing a specially written song called ‘Here’s Looking at You’. Not all Radiolympians were enraptured. To keep the queues moving along, no one could watch for more than a minute and many saw little more than the backof other people’s heads before being told to ‘move along, please’. ‘Is that all?’, ‘Better than I thought’ and ‘Good as the talkies; but rather small’, said some of the first viewers. 34
    The next day’s outside broadcast was more successful. Mitchell stood on the Alexandra Palace balcony and talked viewers through a panoramic view as the camera panned across the gently inclining tree-lined hill: