OTD in early British television: 7 January 1938
John Wyver writes: on Friday 7 January 1938, when Alexandra Palace broadcast a circus OB, a Pepler masque from Aesop’s Fables, a fashion show, and Archie Harradine revue and a dramatisation of W.W. Jacobs’s horror story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, The Times carried a lengthy column under the title ‘One television year’ which is among the most vivid accounts of the workings of the pre-war television operation. Today’s OTD reproduces extracts.
The anonymous column marked the one year anniversary from the discontinuation at the end of January 1937 of the Baird operation at Alexandra Palace, which from the opening three months before had been operational in alternate weeks alongside the far more efficient and more reliable Marconi-EMI set-up.
Television is incongruously housed. Gaunt and unlovely, the Palace dominates part of north London, with only the 220-foot mast to indicate the marvel in the north-east corner. An inadvertent entry by the back door brings the visitor over a desolate branch terminus of the LNER [railway] into empty, echoing halls where the assorted objects might have been assembled by a surrealist.
Sections of stuffed lions, slot machines, a bar, posters of dance competitions, and a statue of Lincoln are distributed haphazard. Only a discreet grey door in a corner, painted ‘No Entry’, marks the back entrance to the overcrowded hive of television…
The station’s day has two feverish campaigns, culminating at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and 9 o’clock in the evening… the piano tuner has to arrive at 7am because there is no room for him later. The morning is filled with rehearsals and a film demonstration for the benefit of the radio trade, and rehearsals have to be juggled in and out of the two stages…
For the convenience of artists, early rehearsals take place at Broadcasting House or Maida Vale; if the artists came to the station more frequently they might find no spaceto rehearse in. When a condensed Othello was performed recently, there was only one two-hour rehearsal on the stage…
The actress playing Desdemona [the wonderful Celia Johnson in an early role] had never seen a television camera before, so that she had little enough time to learn how to act into the camera or to master the art of two-dimensional gesture [because the cameras’ depth-of-field was so narrow]…
The producer is the linchpin of every item, and his control tower, separated from the stage by darkened plate glass, is the most significant place in the studio, for it shows the technical complexities and the differences between television and other forms of entertainment – stage, screen or sound broadcasting. The producer sits next the window, looking at two frames [that is, monitors]. One frame shows the image in course of transmission; on to the other he can switch the field of vision of any camera on the set…
It might be inferred that the running fight with the clock would mean nerves and discontent. Producers and artists would like many more rehearsals… by the cheerfulness of the staff… is a contribution to industrail psychology proving the value to the individual of work in a small undertaking. The glossy impersonality of Broadcasting House has not yet descended on television…
The prevalent spirit was expressed by a studio hand who said, ‘We’re not working; we’re being paid for a hobby.’ With no precedents, with no cramping case law, the station experiments like a bunch of earnest schoolboys…
To describe the television station at the moment is like anatomizing Proteus: it was different yesterday, and it will be different tomorrow… The future is obscure because it has two aspects, the technical and the entertaining: one complex and unsure, both intermingling.
This has not prevented the young art from propounding its own aesthetics, and a few a priori concepts of what the public wants, such as ‘intimacy’ for the drama and ‘instantaneity’ (for the outside broadcast)…
So far England, with the only regular television service, is in this one field of applied science, indisputably ahead of the world. This fact, a platitude to anyone who has examined the subject, is curiously unappreciated by the lay public, who are judging an infant as if it were a backward adult.
Image: the spectacular cutaway drawing of the television studios at Alexandra Place was created for Television and Short-wave World in the autumn of 1936, just before the service went on ait. It includes details of the Baird studios which non-operational from February 1937 until the autumn of 1938, although during this time the spaces were used for rehearsals and occasional extensions of the Marconi-EMI operation.
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