Armchair Nation (5 page)

In
Brave New World
, published that year, Aldous Huxley imagined a different future for television, in the ‘Galloping Senility' ward of the sixty-storey Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. ‘At the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box. Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night,' he wrote. The dying Linda was watching the semi-finals of a tennis championship with an expression of ‘imbecile happiness', while ‘hither and thither
across their square of illumined glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in an aquarium, the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world'. Huxley himself never owned a set and, interviewed in 1959, said that television was ‘a sort of Moloch which demands incessant sacrifice … the people who write for it just go quietly mad'.
²²
His idea of television as an opiate of the masses in
Brave New World
was to become a familiar literary trope. In Pete Davies's Huxleyan novel,
The Last Election
(1986), set in a Britain of the near future ruled by the Money Party, a cable TV channel distracts the unemployed masses from their inevitable death by involuntary euthanasia with the narcotic of twenty-four-hour snooker.

Now that Huxley's vision has hardened into cultural cliché, we have to return to 1932 to realise how prescient it was, for when he wrote
Brave New World
, television was not an ambient presence, our relationship to which has become, in the novelist Ian McEwan's words, a ‘casual obsession which is not unlike that of the well-adjusted alcoholic'.
²³
As an occasional public spectacle, it seemed to have more in common with older traditions of shadow theatre, magic lantern displays or the panoramas and dioramas of the Regency and Victorian periods – sound and light shows with moving canvases of London or scenes from literary works, often featured during intervals of plays, just as Baird's giant television set had been at the Coliseum.

The BBC's experimental television broadcasts, coming from Broadcasting House, received scant attention. There were no schedules or listings so on four nights a week, a scattering of viewers tuned in at 11 p.m., not knowing what they would see. It might be Vic-Wells ballet dancers, the Rotherham comedian Sandy Powell saying ‘Can you hear me, mother?', or Sally the Seal, brought to the studio in a large open Daimler and escorted up in the lift just so she could blow a saxophone and waggle her flippers for the camera. The press paid little
notice unless there was a potential controversy. ‘Apparently the BBC had no objections to pyjamas,' the
London Evening News
reported in November 1934, ‘for I learned today that [the comedian George] Harris will do an act called “I Never Slept a Wink Last Night” prancing round the television studio in pyjamas and trying to shave himself by the light of a flickering television scanner.'
²⁴

The fossil record for this part of television history was non-existent until 1981, when a young amateur computer enthusiast, Donald McLean, borrowed a BBC LP from Harrow Library,
We Seem To Have Lost The Picture
, narrated by the comedian John Bird and made five years earlier to commemorate forty years of BBC television. At one point Bird introduced a rasping sound effect which he called ‘Baird's brain-damaging buzz-saw', an eight-second, 78 rpm recording from the old experimental television broadcasts, discovered in the BBC archives. These broadcasts were transmitted on medium wave, a low enough frequency to be audible. Radio listeners in the early 1930s were familiar with this harsh buzzing sound, the auditory trace of the television picture itself, accompanied by the rhythmic thuds of the locking signal trying to keep it on the screen. ‘That is what your face sounds like,' Baird told them. Fortuitously, McLean had just written some software to transfer sound waves from a tape deck to his home-made computer. One weekend, squatting on the floor of his spare bedroom in Northolt, he managed to turn Baird's brain-damaging buzz-saw into a waveform traced out in green ink on an oscilloscope. He wrote some more software to unravel the data and plot it as a picture and there, on his computer, appeared a reincarnated television image: the blurred head and shoulders of a Charlie Chaplin lookalike.
²⁵

Fifteen years later, McLean was given a disc. Some unknown archivist living in Ealing in the early 1930s had used one of the home audio recording machines which had just come on the market, with a 78 rpm cutting lathe like a gramophone, to record one of the television broadcasts. McLean once again tweaked his computer software to turn the sound into pictures, and brought up a silent, four-minute segment of television on his computer screen. Six young women in bathing suits
nodded their heads to music and high-kicked in synchronised fashion, the camera panning across them in an early television technique called ‘hose-piping', used when there was only one camera. After digging in the BBC archives, McLean discovered that these were the Paramount Astoria Girls, appearing in the first-ever television revue, ‘Looking In', on 21 April 1933.

McLean received another disc, rescued from a house clearance, in 1998. It had been recorded in east London by Marcus Games, an amateur film enthusiast and brother of Abram Games, the graphic designer later responsible for BBC Television's first animated ident, the ‘Bat's wings' logo, in 1953. McLean once again weaved his computing magic. A low-resolution lady with glossy black hair and kiss curls appeared. It was the comedienne and dance band vocalist Betty Bolton, blowing kisses and exiting stage left. Although the higher quality of the image probably meant it was broadcast in 1934 or 1935, it could not be precisely dated: it was just one of the many forgotten nights of early television, a fragment of which, by a mixture of accident and technical perseverance, had reappeared on a computer screen. When McLean showed him the images, John Trenouth, a curator at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford, felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle, and he realised ‘how Howard Carter must have felt when the tomb of Tutankhamun was opened'.
²⁶

When these images had first been seen there were probably about 5,000 sets, including those made from DIY kits or cobbled together by amateur engineers, mostly in London and the Home Counties. Many at Broadcasting House thought this minority pursuit was taking resources away from radio. ‘The BBC is most anxious to know the number of people who are actually seeing this television programme,' it announced in August 1933. ‘Will those who are looking in send a post-card marked “Z” to Broadcasting House immediately. This information is of considerable importance.' The announcement worried investors, who feared that television might be finished if the response was negligible, and shares in Baird and other television manufacturers fell. The results of the postcard census were never made
public, but a year later the
Daily Express
reported that ‘the figures painfully surprised even the most pessimistically minded at Broadcasting House'.
²⁷

Television sustained itself not on its mildly disappointing present but on dreams of its future. The
Manchester Guardian
offered a prize of two guineas for the best suggestions for programmes. The entries revealed a continuing fascination with television's capacity to obliterate distance, to see distant events as they happened. One reader wanted to watch the Oberammergau Passion Play; another suggested High Mass at St Peter's. ‘Perhaps I am a “televisionary”,' wrote another, ‘but I should like to see on the set of the future – the hotel where I am thinking of spending my holidays (all of it, not merely “a corner of the lounge”) and the view (if any) from the bedroom.'
²⁸

The reverse side of this excitement that television might offer an intimate view of faraway things was the fear that it meant being spied upon. In January 1935, announcing the imminent arrival of a new high-definition television service, the Postmaster General, Sir Kingsley Wood, felt the need to assure people that it would not involve surreptitiously witnessing what was going on in other people's homes, as members of the public had feared in submissions to the Selsdon Committee on Broadcasting. ‘I would like to reassure any nervous listeners,' he said in a BBC radio broadcast, ‘that, wonderful as television may be, it cannot, fortunately, be used in this way.' For those unfamiliar with the science of radio waves, this was a common anxiety. One woman wrote to the BBC to complain of its effrontery in broadcasting to her on the wireless while she was in the bath. Anthony Burgess, speculating about the origins of George Orwell's telescreen, noted that, as late as 1948 when
1984
was written, some of the greener viewers believed that ‘the TV set in the corner of the living-room was an eye, and it might really be looking at you … I remember a lot of people were shy of undressing in front of it.'
²⁹

The Selsdon report used the words ‘television-looker' and ‘looker-in' but many found these words awkward and unlovely. The
Daily Express
offered five guineas for a word which, in the editor's opinion,
best described the person watching a television broadcast. Thousands of readers wrote in with suggestions, usually ‘tele-something' duplicated a hundredfold, but also radio-ogler, radioseer, ether-gazer, screen-reader, perceptor, visioner and opticauris. The winning entry was never announced. A
Daily Telegraph
reader, using the analogy of Bakerloo to describe the Baker Street–Waterloo line, suggested that the person who was both a looker and a listener could be a ‘lookener' and the act itself ‘lookening'. Only a tiny number of correspondents suggested ‘viewer', a word that, even in the late 1940s, was still being placed in inverted commas.
³⁰

Alexandra Palace stands over 300 feet above sea level on the slopes of Muswell Hill, one of a gentle ridge of hills known as London's northern heights. In an otherwise low-lying city, it is an obvious place from where radio waves can radiate. Muswell Hill's transformation from countryside to suburb happened rapidly between the 1890s and the 1910s, creating a near-uniform architectural style: rows of redbrick villas with the odd sign of gentility like an ornamented gable or a stained glass window set in a leaded front door. Even before its colonisation in the 1980s by media professionals and other gentrifiers, Muswell Hill was quite well-heeled, the place where the wideboy Arthur Daley of the ITV comedy series
Minder
had ‘a very respectable uncle'.

If you walk down these similar-looking streets today and look up, you will notice something that should really be obvious: the television aerials are all pointing the same way, as indeed they do on every street in Britain. In this case, they are all aimed at an elongated pyramid of latticed steel on the south-east tower of Alexandra Palace, like metal worshippers bowing before a giant metal god. The mast is at the unrenovated end of the building, with broken windows, ‘anti-climb paint' and stern warnings against roller blading. In 1936 it was just as dilapidated: to get to the TV studios you had to walk through empty
marble halls with unused slot machines, flea-bitten stuffed animals and peeling posters advertising tea dances from the building's heyday as the ‘People's Palace' in the 1890s.

On 11 September 1935, after about 1,500 broadcasts, the BBC had closed its television station down, marooning several thousand televisors which were now useless. Baird and many lookers-in complained, but the corporation insisted that for a time it would just mean that it was offering a ‘non-visual service'.
³¹
The experimental service had consisted of a blurry television picture of only thirty lines: rows of electrons fired from the back of the cathode ray tube and written and rewritten across the screen at the speed of light to make up a moving picture. Soon, in place of this crude image would come a new ‘high fidelity' television picture made up of 405 lines, which was almost as good as a moving photograph.