OTD in early British television: 27 June 1935
John Wyver writes: The issue of trade paper Kinematograph Weekly (KW to its regular readers) on Thursday 27 June 1935 carried across two pages a report of an important speech made by Captain A.G.D. West about television to the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Assoication (CEA). The owners and operators of cinemas gathered for their annual meeting in Cardiff were only just beginning to consider how the new medium might change their world.
With its founder John Logie Baird effectively sidelined, Captain West had been taken on by the Baird Company, and its owners Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, to drive forward its television operations. He was setting up an extensive studio operation at Crystal Palace, alongside the company’s business manufacturing receivers.
G-BPC’s corporate ambitions, however, had just suffered a blow with the decision of the Television Advisory Committee to base the planned BBC ‘high definition’ service not alongside his operation in south London but rather north of the river at Alexandra Palace.
Captain West proposed that, unlike broadcast television which was ‘now a Government matter’, television for the cinema ‘was in the hands of exhibitors who might be able to develop the new medium of entertainment and use it to their own profit.’
He affirmed that, while projection via a cathode ray tube was not yet a reality, this would be the system eventually adopted. But it would be dependent on either cable links, which came with a high cost, or transmissions that would not be available to domestic receivers.
His audience was further engaged by film of the Crystal Palace operation and a demonstration of large-screen projection using the intermediate film process. Arnold Favell, who ran a cinema in Sheffield, could see possibilities in the system, but he thought it would be some time before it was sufficiently good for regular showings. As he reflected,
I imagine television will rarely be used for ordinary feature films. More likely it will be used for showing important news events, and will go one better than the present news reels.
In the first months of 1935 the cinema trade press also began to reflect the industry’s growing awareness of, and developing unease about, television. Warning of complacency, and noting that no representative of their trade had offered evidence in the recent Selsdon Committee deliberations, a KW editorial (the paper persisted in a retro use of ‘kinema’) warned that those backing television ‘may, by a combination of ingenuity and luck, produce a revolutionary idea with little or no warning.’
Among the major backers, of course, but not mentioned specifically, were G-BPC and its chairman Isidore Ostrer. The writer identified two questions at the heart of any partnership: on what basis might the BBC’s television service be permitted to screen films, a question that would soon be of concern to the BBC’s newly appointed television executives, and might kinemas be permitted to show directly televised pictures of current events? And the paper issued a quiet warning:
The Trade as a whole should decide here and now upon its attitude towards television… looking ahead to the time when the meanest home will have its own television receiver, and the quality of entertainment will prove a serious rival to that provided in the kinema.
The debate rumbled on throughout the remainder of the decade as ‘cinema television’ increasingly became a reality for the film industry, and indeed for the BBC as well. The tale of cinema television across the decade is one of the least-researched aspects of the history of pre-war television, which itself has been relatively little-studied to date, a lack that I hope that my forthcoming book Magic Rays of Light will begin to address.
[OTD post no. 192; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
Leave a Reply