Armchair Nation (10 page)

A programme called
Viewers' Vote
on Saturday evenings invited them to pass judgement on six selected programmes and send in a postcard. Of about a thousand postcards sent in each week, most rated all six programmes, suggesting a great deal of ‘block viewing'. Viewers had stronger and more polarised reactions than radio listeners did to programmes, probably because it was harder for block viewers to tune out things they did not like. Ninety-one per cent of viewers watched the whole evening's broadcast from 8.30 p.m. to closedown at 10.15 p.m. Few radio programmes drew TV owners away from the set. The nearest things to a dilemma of choice were
Have a Go
with Wilfred Pickles on Wednesday nights and the comedy series
ITMA
on Thursday nights.
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The BBC's conclusions about this block viewing were worthy of the high-minded ideals of its first director general, John Reith. The problem with radio, concluded its researchers, was ‘the difficulty of persuading listeners to keep their fingers from the tuning knob long enough for the programme to secure an entering wedge upon their attention'. Television, by contrast, might be able to ‘enlist the interest of its public in new or unfamiliar fields'. When Mass Observation did a survey of prospective television owners in the spring of 1949, some thought that concentrated viewing in a semi-darkened room was better than absent-minded radio listening, while others worried that it required too total a commitment. ‘There are so many things I can do in my leisure time while listening to and enjoying the wireless, for example, reading, carving and modelling, gardening,' said a 32-year-old school teacher. ‘I am so afraid that television would prove
so attractive that my spare time would be spent straining my eyes looking into a fixed distance screen.'
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Nella Last was not alone, then, among non-viewers in complaining that the nine-by-seven-inch screens were too small, a belief probably encouraged by the large Perspex magnifying glasses attached to some of them and the fact that people often saw them neck-craning among a jostling crowd on the pavement outside a radio shop. But this was not a complaint heard from television owners. ‘This supposed shortcoming of television is voiced only by those who are not viewers,' John Swift assured potential set buyers in his book
Adventures in Vision
, ‘and who base their assumptions on an inspection of a “dead”, white screen in a shop window.' Like Nella Last, two-thirds of Britons had never even seen a television working. An image of the Alexandra Palace mast was now shown every night on the opening credits of Television Newsreel, its pulsing signals seeming to broadcast to the whole world to the tune of a confident wartime march, Charles Williams's ‘Girls in Grey'. But the chalk hills of the Chilterns and the North Downs still formed a natural barrier against these signals, albeit a permeable one. The BBC's one known viewer in the Channel Islands reported pictures of ‘excellent entertainment value'.
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Some postwar television personalities were already starting to emerge. Joan Gilbert, the presenter of the revived
Picture Page
, was an effervescent character prone to stumbling over her lines, laughing for no reason, and saying ‘mmm' a lot while the interviewee was speaking as if she were preparing for the next question. She was, according to the theatre critic Harold Hobson, ‘rather too boisterous for any but the biggest sets'.
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A tall, bespectacled, gas board official called Leslie Hardern, with a passing resemblance to the ascetic Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, presented
Inventors' Club
, introducing back bedroom inventions sent in by viewers. The programme had been born in the
economic crisis of September 1947, when Hardern went on holiday to the French Riviera in the last boatload of tourists to leave the country that year without needing government approval. Convinced that new products were needed for an export drive to rescue the country from economic oblivion, Hardern decided to use television to harness British engineering ingenuity. As soon as each programme ended, the BBC would receive enquiries from manufacturers. Mr H. M. Bickle from Ealing, who had invented a hand cream which could be used in place of soap and water by making dirt roll up into small balls and fall off, generated much interest – although it was his cardboard and metal container, ‘the Bickle tube', that went into production. Mr Gill from Pudsey caused a similar stir with his washing machine that could also wash and dry dishes, peel potatoes and mix dough – but it remained in the prototype stage.
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Other entries to
Inventors' Club
– an ‘ionette' to iron out face wrinkles, a blow-as-you-go foot warmer for those allergic to hot water bottles, an electric dog to scare off burglars, a plughole to make the bath water run away silently without gurgling, a gadget for whisking off bed-clothes – proved, as one critic said, ‘that we are still the race from which sprang Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear'. The brainwaves were a barometer of postwar preoccupations: Hardern received a hundred different versions of a woolwinder submitted by arm-weary husbands of knitters, ninety-six cinder sifters for coal fires and several corporal punishment machines for caning schoolboys. He claimed to have had only one good idea from a woman, an iron with four little retractable legs that served as a stand.
Inventors' Club
suggested a growing sense of involvement in the medium among viewers, although there was no need to own a television to contribute, and many of its inventors had never seen it.
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Algernon Blackwood, then nearly eighty, was a favourite on
Saturday Night Story
. He appeared first in the Halloween broadcast on 1 November 1947, telling a tale, ‘The Curate and the Stockbroker', in which the stockbroker disappeared. Alarmed viewers rang the switchboard when Blackwood, through the use of two identical chairs and a screen dissolve, was also made to disappear, while his echoing voice remained. Blackwood needed no script and refused to rehearse. He
would take the Underground to Wood Green and walk the mile and a half up the hill to the studio, making up the story as he went, emerging out of the darkness and entering for a light dusting of makeup before appearing on camera with moments to spare. He had mastered the art of talking to the individual viewer, greeting them while seated in an armchair, before laying his book aside, taking off his glasses, brushing his eyelids and leaning forward to begin his tale. He told haunting stories based on his years of travel in frontier Canada, the Black Forest and the Danube marshes, and his long absorption in mysticism and magic. He always finished dead on time, though the sharp-eyed viewer might notice his gaze wandering towards the clock overhead.
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‘Here's Terry-Thomas to help you sell more sets,' proclaimed an advertisement for Baird televisions in a trade magazine, exhorting retailers to use his face in cinemas to attract more viewers. In
How Do You View?
, Thomas played a cash-strapped, amiable bounder presenting the show from his bachelor pad. Even on black-and-white sets, his gold-banded Dunhill's cigarette holder and brocade waistcoat shone. A
Picture Post
article, ‘The dandy comes back to W.1', argued that Thomas ‘must be given much of the credit for the return of flowered waistcoats – he will lay you two to one that you cannot stand for three minutes outside the display window of the Piccadilly shop which supplies him with them, without hearing his name mentioned'. He was sent cufflinks, cravats and cummerbunds by viewers, and Thomas aimed the programme very directly at them. ‘I think that if you have an audience in the studio you play to it,' he explained. ‘The viewer at home becomes just an old auntie watching the show from the side of the stage, instead of being the person the show should be directed straight at.' At the start of each episode a tight close-up brought his full face on to the screen. ‘How do you
view
? Are you frightfully
well
? You
are
? Oh, good
show
!', he would say. The camera went in even tighter on his gap-toothed grin, magically sweeping past the gap and dissolving into the next scene. Seven-year-old Sarah Miles, watching with her family in Essex, sometimes ‘laughed so much that Mummy would scold me for peeing on the sofa cushions'.
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But most loved were the three main announcers: Sylvia Peters,
Mary Malcolm and McDonald Hobley, who was also known to viewers as the presenter of the Friday night variety show
Kaleidoscope
, with its popular segment, ‘Puzzle Corner'. Viewers in a pre-announced town were invited to display a copy of the
Radio Times
in their front window and the live programme showed an outside broadcast van driving round the streets. ‘It might be here, it might be anywhere,' Hobley would tantalise viewers, even though the contestant had already been collared by the production team.
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The BBC's genial light entertainment producer, Ronnie Waldman, conducted the quiz by telephone, with the van parked outside the viewer's house, the technology being too primitive to film inside it.

Isolated clips of the announcers today, usually from the more formal occasions that have been preserved, suggest stultifyingly starched attire and pronunciation, although Lord Reith always claimed the BBC accent was an improvement on the overly refined Oxford accent (‘theatah, the fahside and such like') and it aspired to be non-regional rather than class-specific. Contemporary viewers did not think the announcers aloof or formal, for breakdowns were common and their job was to fill in the time reassuringly. Once the interruption went on for so long that Malcolm advised everyone to make a cup of tea and she would call them back if anything happened. Her poodle, Fernandel, sat next to her on a bar stool, and would be told off for yawning while she announced the programmes. ‘In good times and in bad times, through breakdowns, gramophone records and interludes, these people have stood by us with unwavering cheer,' wrote the television critic Caroline Lejeune. ‘One has felt glad for their sakes when normal transmission was resumed; they are our familiar friends; may we never lose them.'
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In December 1949,
The Aeroplane
drew attention to a ‘serious hazard' to aircraft some ten miles north of Birmingham along the Birmingham–Lichfield Road, on a lip of hills overhanging the Midland plain. ‘We advise all pilots to put a red ring on their maps round Sutton Coldfield
and keep clear of the area in low visibility,' the magazine warned.
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The
Radio Times
twice carried a photo of this 750-foot-high hazard on its cover: first, in July when it wasn't yet finished, and then in December, when it was. This was a new feature in the landscape, more futuristic even than the mini-Eiffel Tower of Muswell Hill. It was poised like a giant pencil standing on its point, its tapering base resting on a ballbearing smaller than a cricket ball, which nestled in a socket. Since rigid joints were vulnerable to metal fatigue and rust, this hinged bearing allowed the mast to move by up to two feet in high winds, supported by stays in the surrounding fields, as though it were a moored airship.

This mast, wrote the
Manchester Guardian
, ‘does nothing to besmirch these pleasant wooded hills … Soaring fantastically from a two-inch steel ball on which it is poised, its slender stay-ropes reaching across the fields like the strands of a giant web, it could hardly be regarded by the most ardent rural preserver with anything but admiration and awe'. Norman Collins was still more florid. ‘It is a beautiful sight – that slender, gleaming mast … it is the sort of thing that persuades me that, despite all they do to prove the contrary, engineers are artists at heart and, like other artists, have their lyrical moments, their supreme outbursts,' he wrote. ‘You could stand there speechless and admiring for minutes on end, simply staring up at it as the clouds go cruising past and the aerial itself appears to be sailing off somewhere into Warwickshire.'
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