Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Read Free Book Online Page B

legitimate to cater for a minority of potential window repairers. Out of two hours, however, the allocation of 30 minutes to sucha subject seems disproportionate. Incidentally, as television receivers are about £100 each, I think the average purchaser would be able to afford expert attention for his windows.’ 38
    Gander did concede later that the first edition of
Picture Page
had been ‘one of the outstanding events of a lifetime’ which had ‘filled me with an enthusiasm for a new artform that has never waned’.
Picture Page
had first been shown in October, as a test transmission, watched by a handful of people, including Gander. An enterprising manufacturer had brought a television to Fleet Street for the start of transmissions, but the only accommodation he could find was a seedy hotel bedroom. There the set was installed, looking incongruous against the faded floral wallpaper and an ancient washbasin. ‘My colleagues and I gathered a little sceptically,’ wrote Gander. ‘We left converted.’
    Picture Page
featured well-known personalities and people in the news. It aimed to shift quickly, with the aid of dissolving shots, from interviewee to interviewee like someone flicking through a magazine. The Canadian actress Joan Miller, pretending to be a switchboard operator, introduced each of the guests with television’s first catch-phrase: ‘You’re through. You’re looking at …’ In that first programme, Leslie Mitchell interviewed Ras Prince Monolulu, a racing tipster who wore a plumed headdress and claimed to have been born in Addis Ababa, the son of a Jewish chieftain (unlikely, since his real name was Peter McKay); John Snuggs, a performer who sang songs and tore paper into pretty shapes for theatre queues; and a Siamese cat called Preston Pertona. The star guest was Squadron-Leader F. R. D. Swain, a Farnborough test pilot who had just broken the world altitude record. Swain told Mitchell that, as he flew round in lazy circles, with a view of the English coastline from Land’s End to the Wash, he had nearly suffocated and had to cut a window in his airtight helmet so he could breathe. In subsequent episodes,
Picture Page
featured the bagpipes player from Trafalgar Square, the London taxi driver who had taken a fare to John O’Groats and a silkworm that died of stage fright before it could be interviewed. Gander was so captivated that he watched every programme from the first to the fiftieth, before he went on holiday and broke his run. 39
    Early viewers seem to have shared Gander’s tastes. In broadcasts around Christmas 1936, the owners of television sets were asked to ‘let the BBC know of their existence’ by sending their names and addresses to Broadcasting House on a postcard marked ‘viewer’ – one of the first official uses of this term. The BBC then wrote back to them asking for feedback. By the following June, they had received 118 letters. The least popular programmes were studio demonstrations of cooking, washing and ironing, ‘which were condemned as of little interest to those who could afford television sets’. The most popular were plays, outside broadcasts and
Picture Page
, which was making Thursday ‘stay at home night’. 40
    There were now over a hundred public viewing rooms dotted around London, including at a basement gallery at the Science Museum in South Kensington and EMI’s Abbey Road studios. The General Electric Company also installed a set at a home for deaf and dumb people at Erith, south-east London. It was shown first to about thirty men who, as a fashion parade appeared on the screen, turned to each other and put their thumbs up. They followed intently a showing of zoo animals, a news bulletin and a short play, and applauded warmly at the end. ‘For the great bulk of deaf people wireless has been quite useless,’ said the home’s superintendent. ‘These