OTD in early British television: 7 March 1932
John Wyver writes: The National and Regional programmes on the afternoon of Monday 7 March 1932 carried a radio broadcast of a violin and piano recital given by Helen Luard and May Jardine. But their programme of Beethoven and Handel was also one of a series of simulcasts with the Baird 30-line television operation.
The Baird company, which in the spring of 1932 was still operating the 30-line service that would be taken over by the BBC later in the year, had introduced a portable scanner to the BBC studios at Savoy Hill in the summer of 1931. In mid-August this was first used to broadcast images of a late evening radio broadcast by Jack Payne and his dance band.
This collaboration was most likely facilitated by the Corporation’s chief engineer Noel Ashbridge, who after initial hostility was finally being won over by the Baird technology. ‘Were it possible,’ he wrote after one demonstration, ‘for the ordinary public to buy an apparatus of this kind and run it without difficulty or undue expense, I think we should just have reached real programme value.’
Press reports prompted by the Jack Payne broadcast were universally positive, including that by the Daily Telegraph:
For the first time in the history of the BBC television was included as part of the normal broadcasting programme last night. As a result of the success achieved it is more than probable that television will now become a special weekly feature in the BBC programmes…
Jack Payne was seen conducting the orchestra and also the various vocalists, but experiments are not yet far enough advanced to enable the whole band, except in miniature, to be thrown on the screen at once.
The paper estimated, somewhat optimistically, that perhaps 8,000 viewers might have been able to tune in..
By this stage the Baird company was transmitting Monday through Friday for a half-hour each morning. To this demanding schedule were now added broadcasts, with the single scanner only, of parts of BBC radio broadcasts on Saturdays. Three 10-minute segments of A Light Concert were shown on the afternoon on 24 October, and there were further light music simulcasts roughly once a week up to Christmas.
A recital including a Mozart sonata was given in February, five similar broadcasts followed in March, including this one by Helen Luard and May Jardine, and the final one was a Haydn programme in mid-April 1932.
Transmissions under the control of the Baird company ceased in the summer, on 17 June, and when producer Eustace Robb started the BBC 30-line broadcasts, these were firmly fixed in the television studio, and there were no more experiments with simulcasting until the high definition service started from Alexandra Palace in 1936 was well-established.
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