Television 90
John Wyver writes: Ninety years ago today, the BBC’s high definition television service officially went on air from Alexandra Palace. There are celebrations there this afternoon and evening, and a number of articles and posts are marking the occasion, including the BBC Canvas presentation TV90 – From Trial to Transmission by Jamie Medhurst
I am delighted to make my own contribution below in the form of a lightly edited reprint of the relevant section of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which was published by BFI/Bloomsbury in January…
The final item on the first night of the BBC’s official television service from Alexandra Palace (AP) was a two-minute film sequence shot and previously transmitted earlier that day. As part of the opening ceremony on the afternoon of Monday 2 November 1936, Lord Selsdon, author of the previous year’s report and now chair of the Television Advisory Committee (TAC), gave a short speech of welcome.
Using their intermediate film (IF) process, the Baird company team captured Selsdon in 17.5mm film images and broadcast these less than a minute later to perhaps 400 receivers across London. Accommodating the necessary 54-second delay, a separate system delivered synchronised audio. Thanks to the system’s use of film, and unlike anything from that day’s live Marconi-EMI transmissions, Selsdon could also be seen again just over seven hours after he spoke. (There is no trace of this film sequence today, nor of any of the other IF films.)
So ended a historic day remarkable for the deployment of an array of production technologies, for dependencies on and connections with multiple media forms, for embraces of both modernity and tradition, and for both live and pre-recorded presentations.
‘High definition’ television, so-called because of the 240- (soon to be discontinued) and 405-line transmissions, began as the complex hybrid it would continue to be, with one break and ever-improving achievement, for the next 34 months.
Only a week before, concerned about the quality and reliability of the Baird IF set-up, the TAC had organised what proved to be a ‘not entirely satisfactory’ demonstration. As a consequence, both this and the Marconi-EMI technologies were in operation to present, twice in succession, an hour of inaugural speeches, Adele Dixon (pictured) putting over the specially composed song ‘Television’, and the Black singing duo Buck and Bubbles.
In the Baird sequence, Leslie Mitchell offered a welcome from the separate spotlight studio before handing across, apparently with immaculate timing, to the IF transmission of a speech by BBC chairman R.C. Norman that had had to start the required 54 seconds earlier. Selsdon’s contribution followed shortly afterwards. Given all of their problems across the previous month, however, the nervous Baird engineers had their still-to-be-fully-tested electron camera lined up alongside the IF one in case an emergency cross-over was required.
Both transmission clusters in the afternoon also included the 8-minute film bulletin British MovietoneNews no 387. Repeated for a third time that evening, and released into cinemas that day, the newsreel featured the arrival in London of the Jarrow marchers protesting against unemployment and shots of the aftermath of civil disturbances in India. As a consequence the desperate social conditions of many at home and the escalating challenges to the Empire abroad were present, albeit briefly, on television at the very beginning.
England’s cricketers in Perth appeared in the newsreel, as did Shirley Temple awarding badges to scouts, foreshadowing the centrality to the new medium of both sport and entertainment. The day’s most substantial film presentation, however, was the first showing at 9.05pm of the 18-minute documentary Television Comes to London (to be shown this Wednesday evening on BBC Four, and then available on iPlayer), after which came an IF presentation of the magazine programme Picture Page.
Producer Cecil Madden’s guest list for Picture Page nodded towards many of the emerging medium’s intermedial connections, with film director Alexander Shaw, Punch cartoonist George Whitelaw, and Gertrude Donisthorpe, thought to have been the first female radio announcer more than a decade before. A brief variety sketch titled ‘Guy Fawkes interruption’ featured alongside Algernon Blackwood telling two ghost stories.
Representing the modern world were record-breaking air ace Jim Mollison (also in the day’s MovietoneNews) and tennis champion Kay Stammers, but there was a strong sense of tradition too, with the Pearly King and Queen of Blackfriars, the King’s bargemaster ‘Bossy’ Phelps, and Percy Grainger, Lord Mayor’s Coachman. All were crammed into a modern micro-schedule mediated by ‘switchboard girl’ Joan Miller.
Just over a week later, controller of programmes Cecil Graves, with responsibility across both radio and television, informed director of television Gerald Cock that the hierarchy ‘were all very disappointed with the opening ceremony’.
Responding generally to the first week’s programmes, his key criticisms, which included a racially derogatory adjective, were ‘film technique, which we must get away from [although his concerns are not clear]; stupid familiarity – i.e. Christian names, etc. by announcers; the undesirability of negroid performances when transmitting hours were so short; [that it was] essential to avoid any form of Americanisation; dance music to be absolutely the best of its kind and no close-ups of crooners.’
Control Board reviewed the opening on 1 December when director-general John Reith commented that ‘the service had at any rate high informative and educational potentialities even if the purely entertainment possibilities were more limited.’
In line with such thinking, Graves stressed the enormous opportunity on offer to Cock. ‘He was starting a new service from scratch,’ he noted ‘and was not handicapped by any previous methods of presentation or commitments; therefore, he could make it really worthy of the BBC and literally do anything he liked with it.’
Graves was only partly correct, since Cock would face a host of constraints, both internal and from beyond the Corporation. In the following nearly three years of transmissions, before AP shut down for the war, the pioneers would, through cautious exploration combined with a ferment of experimentation, conjure up a cornucopia of television formats and techniques that were, for the most part at least, truly worthy of the BBC.
These transmissions would be witnessed in show-rooms and exhibitions across greater London, and by a small but growing domestic audience among the suburban middle-classes. For those viewers, these broadcasts would extend a dense network of links to radio, film and other media of the time and enhance a complex and largely cohesive national culture.
In this most significant pre-war stage of transforming the technology of television into a medium, what Cock and colleagues brought into being would, in a phrase that is only minimally hyperbolic, transform the modern world.
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