OTD in early British television: 17 April 1937
John Wyver writes: Just after 3pm on Saturday 17 April 1937 BBC Television began an ‘outside broadcast’ from the railway terminus adjacent to Alexandra Palace. Billed as Demonstration of Railway Locomotives, and organised with London North Eastern Railway, the transmission featured Pacific, Silver Jubilee and Atlantic locomotives, brought onto this branch line especially for this programme. Commentary was provided by the stalwart Leslie Mitchell and ‘Inspector Jenkins’, presumably a LNER official.
The railway station at AP, which opened in 1873 and closed in 1954, was right alongside the north face of the Palace, as can be seen from the detail of a 1920 Ordnance Survey map above. The sidings were sufficiently close to an entry point to Studio A, on the south side, so that one or more cameras linked with heavy cables to the interior control room could be used for the broadcast. Six months on from the official opening of the 405-line service, this was still the way in which ‘local OBs’ were organised.
Local OBs of this kind included golf lessons in the Park, demonstrations of model aircraft, parades of vintage cars, and displays of trained dogs and horse jumping. It was only with the delivery, some three weeks after this trainspotting adventure, of the BBC’s first Marconi-EMI mobile control unit, that remote OBs could be broadcast from across London — starting with the Coronation parade on 5 May.
You can find a wonderfully detailed post about Alexandra Palace station at ‘Disused Stations Site Record’: http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/a/alexandra_palace/