Armchair Nation (4 page)

People were fascinated, in a way that we would also be were we not inured to it through habit, by this strange phenomenon, the radio wave, which could race through all intervening obstacles and show distant events at the moment they were occurring, undetectable without that magical deciphering machine, a wireless or television receiver. One of the radio wave's great charms was that, unlike the telephone or the telegraph, it radiated to no one in particular. The earliest term for viewers was ‘lookers in', which, like the radio term ‘listeners in', suggested they were eavesdropping on something not meant solely for their eyes and ears.

The word ‘broadcasting', which radio borrowed about a hundred years ago from the farmer's term for scattering seeds over a wide surface rather than neatly in rows, carried the same connotations of chance. Anyone with a televisor could tune in and pluck these animated images out of apparently empty space. The low frequency microwaves on which this primitive television was broadcast travelled vast distances, even though the transmitter was weak. One day in the autumn of 1929, a young Bessarabian engineer, Boris Alperovici, sat in a darkened room in a villa in the volcanic peaks of Capri, at a workbench surrounded with radio and TV equipment. He had read about Baird's broadcasts in a technical journal and had straightaway ordered two sets from England, one to pick up sound and the other vision. At first he could not get the sets past Italian customs because they did not recognise such a thing as television; but after much cajoling, they let them travel by boat from Naples to Capri. Alperovici assembled them in his radio workshop at the villa and waited for the tests to start. The first thing he saw, on a screen slightly bigger than a postage stamp spewing ugly red light from the cathode ray, was Gracie Fields. Twenty-three years later, Alperovici and Fields married, after Fields's nephew had knocked on his door in Capri, where Fields had a villa, and asked if he could fix his aunt's radio.
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This story, told to the
TV Times
in 1955, may be a case of the wish fathering the thought. Perhaps Alperovici wanted to believe his
future wife was the first thing he saw on a television in 1929, although she did appear in some early broadcasts, some of which reached even further than Capri. On the island of Madeira, off the north African coast, W. L. Wraight, an amateur English engineer and member of the newly formed Television Society, built an aerial from copper tubing, installed it on top of his house in the island's capital, Funchal, and got fairly good pictures from the mast over 1,500 miles away on top of Selfridge's, at least between September and April when atmospheric conditions allowed. Although the images came without sound, Wraight declared himself delighted ‘that such small items as teeth, buttons, cuff links, roller skates, and the dividing line between studio background and floor have all been quite easily distinguishable'.
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More remarkably, Funchal sits in a natural amphitheatre to the south, facing the Atlantic, so the television signal had managed to make it over the island's volcanic mountains.

Even those a few streets away from Baird's studio felt the thrill of pulling a picture out of the air. ‘I must thank you very warmly for the television instrument you have put into Downing Street,' the prime minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote to Baird after the first synchronised sound and vision broadcast in March 1930. ‘What a marvellous discovery you have made! When I look at the transmissions I feel that the most wonderful miracle is being done under my eye … You have put something in my room which will never let me forget how strange is the world – and how unknown.'
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The novelist Anthony Burgess later claimed to have seen one of these early broadcasts: Luigi Pirandello's
The Man with a Flower in his Mouth
, the first television play, shown on the afternoon of 14 July 1930. To the strains of Carlos Gardel singing ‘El Carretero', the play opened in an all-night café. A businessman who had missed the last, midnight train began talking to a stranger sipping a mint frappé. ‘Death has passed my way and put this flower in my mouth,'
the stranger told him. He was dying of an epithelioma, a cancerous growth on his lip. He began evoking scenes of quotidian life which suddenly felt precious now he would soon no longer be able to witness them. ‘Helps me to forget myself,' he said of his new habit of staring into shop windows, an unconscious allusion to the future power of television. ‘I never let it rest a moment – my imagination! I cling with it … to the lives of other people.'

It was a bleak choice of play for this momentous broadcast, but its avant-garde minimalism – with only two speaking characters, lots of soliloquys and a twenty-minute running time – helped to conceal the medium's imperfections, particularly the fact that the televisable area was so small that only one actor could appear at a time. ‘It was certainly startling, as well as helpful to the dialogue, to be able to see their every expression – even to the lifting of the eyebrows,' noted the
Daily Mail
. ‘We even saw the gestures of their hands – although we had to sacrifice their faces for the time being.' The
Manchester Guardian
's reporter had to apologise to his readers for being unable to file a review. He had missed the entire broadcast, having arrived at the head of the queue to watch the Selfridge's televisor just as it was fading out.
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As Anthony Burgess often reminded people, his hero James Joyce referred to television in
Finnegans Wake
as a ‘bairdboard bombardment screen' and a ‘faroscope', terms which convey the interwar excitement about the cathode ray's capacity to reveal visions of faraway things. (Burgess misremembered it as the more melodious ‘bairdbombardmentboard'.) Although highbrow in most of his other tastes, Burgess remained generous about television all his life. ‘A compulsive viewer who will sit guiltily in front of test-cards and even
This Is Your Life
,' he wrote on taking over as the
Listener
's television critic in May 1963, ‘I groan my way towards palliation of the guilt – the penance of dredging words out of my eyeballs.'
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Burgess actually felt little guilt. As
Listener
critic he watched no more television than he did normally, staying up all Friday night to write his column. In November 1963, after returning from a holiday in Morocco, he wrote that it was easy ‘to indulge the romantic delusion
that the life of goatherds, beggars, Marrakesh buskers, and Tangier junkies is
real
life, and that the British evening with television and chestnuts is a sort of substitute. Nonsense, of course – a mixture of sentimental Rousseauism and snobbish xenomania … The Moors would be better off looking at [the soap opera]
Compact
than at nothing.' Burgess remained unafflicted by the snobbery about television that suffused British intellectual life when it became a mass form in the 1950s, perhaps because he had been excited about it in its embryonic form. In later life, he became a fan of Benny Hill, calling him ‘one of the great artists of our age', and at Hill's memorial service in 1992 it was he who gave the eulogy.
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In fact it seems unlikely that Burgess saw the Pirandello on television as he claimed, especially since he wrongly dated it to 1932.
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In the summer of 1930 Burgess was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy called John Wilson, and there were unlikely to have been many Baird televisors in the poor area of Moss Side, Manchester, where he lived with his parents above a tobacconist's shop. In any case, the broadcast was on a Monday afternoon, a school day, and the studious Burgess was an unlikely truant. He either embellished the truth as a novelist might or, more likely, rewrote it in his memory as people are wont to do with such an ephemeral activity as television viewing. The Inner London Education Authority reconstructed the broadcast in 1967; perhaps it was this that he saw.

It is, however, highly likely that Burgess listened to the first television programmes, for they were broadcast on the BBC's radio wavelength. As an avid reader of the
Radio Times
and the
Listener
, he would certainly have known about television, and he had built his own crystal radio set to hear Sir Adrian Boult's BBC Symphony Orchestra. After trying and failing to use his bed's wire mattress as an aerial, because it was full of fluff, he bought aerials that reached to his bedroom ceiling; he could then pick up stations as far away as the continent, listening to them on his headphones before drifting off to sleep.
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So when the BBC began supplementing its mid-morning television broadcasts with late-night ones on Tuesdays and Fridays, after the radio programmes had ended, he would have picked them
up. These early television programmes had far more listeners than viewers. Tap dancing was a popular feature because, although early television screens could not really cope with such frantic motion, listeners appreciated the sound of dancers' feet.

Among those who did see the Pirandello play were an invited audience of VIPs, including Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of long-distance radio, who just before 3.30 p.m. on the Monday afternoon were winched up the outside of Baird's Long Acre studio on a rickety open-air goods hoist with no railings. On the roof, they stood under a canvas canopy in front of a five-foot-high television, composed of 2,000 tiny incandescent bulbs spaced an inch apart, so the screen looked like a giant honeycomb. Each bulb lit up in turn to give the light and shade of the picture. Halfway through, the bulbs became so hot that they started to melt the screen's edges. A panic-stricken note was sent from the roof to the studio below, where Baird said, ‘Tell them to go on, and let it melt.'
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One of the viewers on the Long Acre studio roof was the booking agent of the nearby London Coliseum. On his recommendation, Sir Oswald Stoll, the Coliseum's owner, hired the giant television for a fortnight's run at the theatre, starting on 28 July 1930, showing it during intervals. As the lights went down in the auditorium, a master of ceremonies stood at the side of the stage with a telephone in his hand. On the widest proscenium arch in London, the giant television looked rather small. A human face appeared on screen, broadcast from the Long Acre studio a few streets away. ‘Would any member of the audience like to ask a question of the speaker?' asked the MC. ‘Tell him to put his hand up,' cried someone from the darkness of the stalls. The MC telephoned this instruction to Long Acre and the speaker raised his hand to his chin. More interactive experiments followed. The Lord Mayor of London, on screen, asked his wife in the audience what time dinner would be and she replied, by phone, ‘eight
o'clock'. The ‘Charming Belles in Harmony', Helen Yorke and Virginia Johnson, performed a duet with Yorke on stage and Johnson on screen. ‘There was a kind of rustling effect all over the screen,' wrote
The Sphere
magazine, ‘but through it one could distinctly make out the features of one well known personage after another. One could not only hear them speak, but see their lips moving.'
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The highlight of the run was the sixty-year-old music hall comedian George Robey, the ‘Prime Minister of Mirth', doing a turn on the Coliseum stage, then running to nearby Long Acre while Baird showed a Robey film talkie and then, a little out of breath, appearing on television on the Coliseum big screen. It helped that Robey's trademark costume – a bald-fronted wig, red nose and heavily blacked eyebrows – was easily viewable and his ‘whiplash diction', in Laurence Olivier's appreciative phrase, carried his voice through the theatre from the set.
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Television thrived among these big crowds. In June 1932 several thousand people at the Metropole Cinema near Victoria Station watched the Epsom Derby on a screen ten foot high by eight foot wide. Baird had shown the same race a year earlier, witnesses recording that ‘a good imagination was required' and the horses and riders looked ‘like out-of-focus camels'. But this broadcast was more successful: the Metropole audience could see the bookmakers' tic-tac hand signals and the horses rounding Tattenham Corner and flashing past the finish, though not even the announcer could tell who had won. Baird's assistant, Tony Bridgewater, said that this time ‘you could at least tell they were horses'. Baird took a curtain call afterwards to cries of ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!', receiving a bigger cheer than the Derby winner, which turned out to be April the Fifth.
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