OTD in early British television: 24 May 1938
John Wyver writes: Just as for the BBC’s coverage this week, 87 years ago the corporation’s mobile unit visited Chelsea Flower Show (above) for three broadcasts, beginning with a 40-minute broadcast on Sunday 22 May with Freddie Grisewood and Elizabeth Cowell, along with television gardener Mr Middleton, looking at the construction of various gardens.
The team returned the next afternoon for a half-hour transmission, with Mr Middleton interviewing various exhibitors, and on Tuesday 24 May a 20-minute show late morning featured a discussion of flowers in the East Tent (likely the scene in the image above), as well as consideration of topiary and garden furniture.
The Times approved:
Television afforded a new delight to viewers last week, when they were taken by Mr C.H. Middleton on a personally conducted tour of the Chelsea Flower Show. Mr Middleton always gives the impression that he has come straight to the microphone with the mud still clinging to his boots, and this time we could see him in a real garden [as opposed to patch of ground taken over near the AP studio] and enjoy to the full the easy informality of his talk.
The visit to Chelsea on Monday was especially interesting, for not only did we have glimpses of busy workmen creating the gardens before our eyes, but some of the most famous exhibitors were brought before the cameras to tell us about their exhibits and to show them to us.
In The Listener, Peter Purbeck was considerably more circumspect:
It must have been plain to the authorities before ever they took it on that Chelsea would prove an unusually tough nut to crack. Scent and colour are, it will presumably be agreed, the two most important qualities of flowers; and scent and colour are just the two aspects of reality that television is unable to bring into our homes.
At the same time there was a good deal to be sa,d for sending the mobile unit into the grounds of the Royal Hospital. Flowers, even when shorn of colour and scent, ought to provide viewers with something good to look at. Added to that there was the news interest – always a good thing in television; the sense of being in on something before the general public…
The writer’s interest in gardening is, it must be confessed, polite rather than informed. But it so happened that on the Tuesday morning he had with him one who was something of an expert… And when the camera was turned upon the rich array of roses, and Mr. Middleton called upon us to admire, the viewer in question remarked that they might have been as many tomatoes for all one could see of them.
The criticism was perhaps direct to the point of discourtesy; at the same time it hit the nail on the head. The fact is that with television in its present stage our screens are small. And if an object such as a rose is shown to us some distance away its image is minute. It appears merely as a light-coloured dot.
Would it not have been possible for Mr. Middleton or Miss Cowell to have picked just one rose and held it before the camera so that we might admire it in all its grace? Perhaps the exhibitors would have objected, perhaps just one rose the less would have marred the splendour of their display. It would certainly have made things much more exciting for the viewer.
It was interesting, incidentally, to compare the treatment given to Chelsea in the newsreel of the opening shown to us later in the week. Reduced to the dimensions of the television screen, we could see no more of the flowers in the film version than we could in television’s more direct view, but probably what made the editors of the news reel consider the item of sufficient interest for the footage they gave it was the presence of the King and Queen. After all if we cannot see the flowers it is some compensation to be able to see their Majesties walking about the grounds.
[OTD post no. 158]
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