Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Read Free Book Online Page A

‘On the horizon, the Lea Valley, and now we are passing over Hornsey and Finsbury Park, and I wonder if you can see the smoke that is just by the Harringay greyhound stadium? … On the road below you will notice someone passing. There goes a car. Another one is just coming in … This view we see every day, and I think you will agree there is not a finer view to be seen anywhere in London.’ 35 Mitchell pointed out Hackney marshes, St Paul’s Cathedral obscured by mist and children playing near the Alexandra Park racecourse. A neat trick designed to show that the television pictures were live, this broadcast conveyed something of the distance-obliterating miracle of the camera obscura, that primitive but enchanting form of television in which the outer world arrived on the white table of a darkened room through nothing more high-tech than mirrors, a periscope and light travelling through a pinhole.
    Radiolympia was not the only place to watch television. At Waterloo Station, the Southern Railway turned a waiting room on platform 16 into a television theatre, with admission by train ticket only, and passengers, many of them off on holiday to the south coast, watched as they waited for their trains. On 4 September, a Douglas-Fokker airliner left Croydon and, after it had climbed to 4,000 feet, the curtains were drawn and a Baird television switched on. ‘With hardly a flicker on the screen we saw and heard Charles Laughton in his new film, “Rembrandt”, while high over Radiolympia we watched news-reel pictures of the Spanish Civil War,’ wrote one passenger. ‘Several thousand feet above Alexandra Palace the pictures became crystal clear, and every gesture of the actors was plainly visible.’ 36
    The BBC television service officially began at 3 p.m. on 2 November 1936, when star of stage and screen musicals Adele Dixon sang a song called ‘Television’ which celebrated the ‘mighty maze ofmystic, magic rays’ that would ‘bring a new wonder to you’. Only about 400 sets were capable of tuning in. The new broadcasts were for an hour a day at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., except Sundays. The first week of programmes included keeper David Seth-Smith bringing a party of animals from Regent’s Park in ‘Friends from the zoo’, Montague Weekly presenting ‘Inn signs through the ages’ and animal impersonators from the pantomimes appearing in ‘Animals all’.
    On these first television sets, the screen, the fat end of the cathode ray tube, was at the top of the set facing the ceiling because the tube was so long it had be placed vertically in the wooden cabinet. As early cathode ray guns would often explode, another advantage of this arrangement was that, should this happen, the broken glass would shoot up rather than out into the living room. The television picture appeared on a mirror placed at an angle on the lid of the set, as though the magical moving images were hidden inside the box and could only be seen obliquely through this enchanted glass. The sound was vastly superior to radio, because it arrived on the same ultra short waves as the pictures, with more bandwidth than was needed. It was, said Douglas Birkinshaw, the delighted BBC engineer, ‘like driving down a motorway one mile wide’. 37

    Some more critical voices, though, were starting to protest about the dullness of programmes showing champion exhibits from the National Cat Club Show or the transport minister lecturing on arterial roads. L. Marsland Gander, the
Daily Telegraph
’s newly appointed television critic, complained of drearily technical, lantern lectures on radio transmitter valves or the mobile Post Office. There was worse to come. ‘I find that next Saturday a Mr J. T. Baily is to demonstrate on the television screen how to repair a broken window,’ wrote Gander. ‘Probably at some future time, when we have television all day long, it will be