OTD in early British television: 25 January 1937
John Wyver writes: Nearly three months after the official opening of the BBC’s ‘high definition’ Television service from Alexandra Palace, The Midland Daily Telegraph ran a round-up feature about the new medium. Published on Monday 25 January 1937, this anonymous and lengthy column touches on many of the key issues facing the AP operation, at the same time as indicating just how uncertain its future was seen to be.
The paper was based in Coventry, and so naturally the article is much concerned with when the service might be extended to the Midlands. ‘Information to hand,’ the writer notes, ‘suggests it may not be so very far off, perhaps only a year from now.’ In fact, Coventry would not see television until the Sutton Coldfield transmitter was fired up on 17 December 1949.
Director of Television Gerald Cock had given a radio talk four days before, and the article draws extensively on his words:
Ultimately, we hope to provide a service with a balanced mixture of entertainment and general interest, presented as only television can present, and apeing neither the pictures, nor the stage, nor the newspapers. But please do not think by that, that we are going “highbrow”; nothing could be further from the truth.
At this point there were probably no more than a few hundred receivers in homes in and around London, and more people were sampling television in public viewing rooms, many of them set up by set manufacturers and retailers. Cock was not at all happy about this:
He stresses the idea of people obtaining a false idea of the service by casually dropping in at a television viewing room and seeing an item or two which might bore or annoy them. It is obvious that programmes designed for viewing rooms – for what may be called casual viewers – should be different from those for home set-owners.
The journalist justified the column inches given over to Cock by writing they were included ‘with the purpose of showing Warwickshire listeners that television really is a force to be reckoned with’, before continuing:
Computations as to its popularity has even deduced the fact that women are keener televiewers than men, and the suggestion that 75 per cent of the matter for television will have women appeal.
But there were other ideas about how television might be mobilised:
I learn that Scotland Yard has given careful consideration to the possibilities of televising pictures of “wanted” men as soon as there are enough listeners to make the transmission worthwhile.
The slippage between ‘televiewers’ and ‘listeners’ is one indication of how unstable ideas about the medium were in these first months. The journalist also felt the need to describe, in rather delightfully poetic terms, what it was like to turn on a television set.
It is, if anything, even simpler to operate than a wireless set. Just as you now switch on to National or Regional, you look up whether the BBC are transmitting on the ‘240-line’ system or the ‘405-line’, and turn a knob accordingly.
In fact, this was the final week of the Baird transmissions on 240 lines; the following Saturday would see the closedown of that system and the commitment to the Maconi-EMI 405-line broadcasts.
After a few seconds a white spot appears in the centre of the screen. It rapidly spreads in size, growing broader and taller in a fascinating way while the set ‘warms up’; then quite suddenly a moving picture is flashed onto the screen at the same moment as the sound comes through.
I should perhaps admit that I am old enough to recall seeing that ‘white spot’ appear on numerous occasions.
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