Armchair Nation (6 page)

Commuters on the London and North Eastern Railway line into King's Cross could see from their train windows one of Alexandra Palace's corner towers disappear, the hole being filled with seventeen tonnes of concrete and the new mast climbing rapidly each day to its final height of 215 feet. It resembled a giant piece of Meccano, that favourite interwar present for children of better-off families. Its summit was over 600 feet above sea level, 200 feet higher than St Paul's Cathedral and with a radiating radius of about twenty-five miles. Receiving vans toured all over the outer edges of London, testing the strength of the signals from the top of the mast to see how far they would reach.

Interwar radio listeners knew all about a band of ionised air in the upper atmosphere called the Heaviside layer, or the ‘radio roof'. When Marconi first announced he would be sending a radio signal across the Atlantic, scientists were sceptical, believing that electromagnetic waves could not travel beyond 200 miles because they would meet that 100-mile high wall of water, caused by the earth's curvature, blocking the view from Britain to north America. But on 12 December 1901, Marconi stood on Signal Hill, Newfoundland and, as he had promised, picked up a Morse signal from Poldhu in Cornwall. A self-taught physicist, Oliver Heaviside, speculated in a 1902
Encyclopaedia Britannica
article on telegraphy that a reflecting layer of ionised gases in the upper atmosphere may have bounced Marconi's radio waves back and helped them bend round the earth.

In the 1920s, another physicist, Professor E. V. Appleton of King's College London, demonstrated, with the help of the BBC's radio transmitter at Bournemouth, that this ‘ionosphere' existed. Appleton also invited the early lookers-in to help him determine the properties of the Heaviside layer by writing to him with information about where they were receiving television images from and what the pictures were like.
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But only ultra short radio waves could carry the amount of information in the new 405-line TV pictures and these would not be reflected by the ionosphere. They would travel in two directions from the television mast: vertically and horizontally. The vertical waves would shoot up, straight through the earth's atmosphere and into outer space. The horizontal waves would shoot outwards at the height of the transmitter, rather like a lighthouse beam trained on the horizon, and reach about as far as the eye could see from the mast.

London spreads out along the wide flood plain of the Thames valley, so high ground close to the centre of the city was in short supply. There were two possible sites for a mast, to the south and north: Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill, where Baird already had a mast, and Alexandra Palace. Crystal Palace was the more prestigious address: viewable from eight counties, it was London's Eiffel Tower, and a homeowner's test of a good outlook was that ‘you can see the Palace from here'. But the BBC chose its northern cousin because north Londoners, who were more prosperous and more likely to buy televisions, would get a better signal from it, and the coaches carrying performers and producers from Broadcasting House would take just twenty minutes to arrive. It turned out to be a wise choice. On the night of 30 November 1936, the staff of the fledgling television service watched aghast from the esplanade along Alexandra Palace's southern face as Crystal Palace burned to the ground along with the Baird television transmitter, the flames making a red glare in the sky that could be seen for miles around.

The move to Alexandra Palace coincided with the annual ‘Radiolympia' show at the Olympia exhibition centre in Earls Court, held in early autumn at the start of the wireless season when people bought sets for the indoor months. A fraught message arrived at Alexandra Palace that hardly anyone was buying televisions, not unreasonably when nothing was being broadcast on them, and the radio industry was suffering from poor sales. So with just nine days' notice the television service was told to begin broadcasting from 26 August, to coincide with Radiolympia's opening day. Engineers started tests on 12 August and for the next fortnight a tiny number of viewers saw Leslie Mitchell, a pencil-moustachioed former actor already christened a ‘Television Adonis' by the
Daily Mail
, talking off the top of his head to the camera. The new medium was simply filling time, a complaint that has echoed through the decades. But the television critic Kenneth Baily, watching Mitchell on one of the few commercial sets, reflected years later that ‘the gagging act he did then, talking attractively about nothing in particular so that we kept the machine switched on, has never been surpassed on television'.
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At 11.45 a.m. on Wednesday 26 August 1936, BBC television broadcast the smooth sounds of Duke Ellington's ‘Solitude' accompanied by a test card. At noon, Olympia's doors opened. Hundreds of people jostled to get inside the seatless, darkened viewing booths, black-draped boxes reminiscent of Victorian peep shows, or they perched on tiered seats in front of television sets in the main foyer like a theatre audience, to see the programme coming from ten miles away on the northern heights. The first broadcast, a variety show with a tuxedoed male voice trio called the Three Admirals and a pantomime horse called Pogo, began with Helen McKay singing a specially written song called ‘Here's Looking at You'. Not all Radiolympians were enraptured. To keep the queues moving along, no one could watch for more than a minute and many saw little more than the back
of other people's heads before being told to ‘move along, please'. ‘Is that all?', ‘Better than I thought' and ‘Good as the talkies; but rather small', said some of the first viewers.
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The next day's outside broadcast was more successful. Mitchell stood on the Alexandra Palace balcony and talked viewers through a panoramic view as the camera panned across the gently inclining tree-lined hill: ‘On the horizon, the Lea Valley, and now we are passing over Hornsey and Finsbury Park, and I wonder if you can see the smoke that is just by the Harringay greyhound stadium? … On the road below you will notice someone passing. There goes a car. Another one is just coming in … This view we see every day, and I think you will agree there is not a finer view to be seen anywhere in London.'
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Mitchell pointed out Hackney marshes, St Paul's Cathedral obscured by mist and children playing near the Alexandra Park racecourse. A neat trick designed to show that the television pictures were live, this broadcast conveyed something of the distance-obliterating miracle of the camera obscura, that primitive but enchanting form of television in which the outer world arrived on the white table of a darkened room through nothing more high-tech than mirrors, a periscope and light travelling through a pinhole.

Radiolympia was not the only place to watch television. At Waterloo Station, the Southern Railway turned a waiting room on platform 16 into a television theatre, with admission by train ticket only, and passengers, many of them off on holiday to the south coast, watched as they waited for their trains. On 4 September, a Douglas-Fokker airliner left Croydon and, after it had climbed to 4,000 feet, the curtains were drawn and a Baird television switched on. ‘With hardly a flicker on the screen we saw and heard Charles Laughton in his new film, “Rembrandt”, while high over Radiolympia we watched news-reel pictures of the Spanish Civil War,' wrote one passenger. ‘Several thousand feet above Alexandra Palace the pictures became crystal clear, and every gesture of the actors was plainly visible.'
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The BBC television service officially began at 3 p.m. on 2 November 1936, when star of stage and screen musicals Adele Dixon sang a song called ‘Television' which celebrated the ‘mighty maze of
mystic, magic rays' that would ‘bring a new wonder to you'. Only about 400 sets were capable of tuning in. The new broadcasts were for an hour a day at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., except Sundays. The first week of programmes included keeper David Seth-Smith bringing a party of animals from Regent's Park in ‘Friends from the zoo', Montague Weekly presenting ‘Inn signs through the ages' and animal impersonators from the pantomimes appearing in ‘Animals all'.

On these first television sets, the screen, the fat end of the cathode ray tube, was at the top of the set facing the ceiling because the tube was so long it had be placed vertically in the wooden cabinet. As early cathode ray guns would often explode, another advantage of this arrangement was that, should this happen, the broken glass would shoot up rather than out into the living room. The television picture appeared on a mirror placed at an angle on the lid of the set, as though the magical moving images were hidden inside the box and could only be seen obliquely through this enchanted glass. The sound was vastly superior to radio, because it arrived on the same ultra short waves as the pictures, with more bandwidth than was needed. It was, said Douglas Birkinshaw, the delighted BBC engineer, ‘like driving down a motorway one mile wide'.
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Some more critical voices, though, were starting to protest about the dullness of programmes showing champion exhibits from the National Cat Club Show or the transport minister lecturing on arterial roads. L. Marsland Gander, the
Daily Telegraph
's newly appointed television critic, complained of drearily technical, lantern lectures on radio transmitter valves or the mobile Post Office. There was worse to come. ‘I find that next Saturday a Mr J. T. Baily is to demonstrate on the television screen how to repair a broken window,' wrote Gander. ‘Probably at some future time, when we have television all day long, it will be legitimate to cater for a minority of potential window repairers. Out of two hours, however, the allocation of 30 minutes to such
a subject seems disproportionate. Incidentally, as television receivers are about £100 each, I think the average purchaser would be able to afford expert attention for his windows.'
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Gander did concede later that the first edition of
Picture Page
had been ‘one of the outstanding events of a lifetime' which had ‘filled me with an enthusiasm for a new artform that has never waned'.
Picture Page
had first been shown in October, as a test transmission, watched by a handful of people, including Gander. An enterprising manufacturer had brought a television to Fleet Street for the start of transmissions, but the only accommodation he could find was a seedy hotel bedroom. There the set was installed, looking incongruous against the faded floral wallpaper and an ancient washbasin. ‘My colleagues and I gathered a little sceptically,' wrote Gander. ‘We left converted.'

Picture Page
featured well-known personalities and people in the news. It aimed to shift quickly, with the aid of dissolving shots, from interviewee to interviewee like someone flicking through a magazine. The Canadian actress Joan Miller, pretending to be a switchboard operator, introduced each of the guests with television's first catch-phrase: ‘You're through. You're looking at …' In that first programme, Leslie Mitchell interviewed Ras Prince Monolulu, a racing tipster who wore a plumed headdress and claimed to have been born in Addis Ababa, the son of a Jewish chieftain (unlikely, since his real name was Peter McKay); John Snuggs, a performer who sang songs and tore paper into pretty shapes for theatre queues; and a Siamese cat called Preston Pertona. The star guest was Squadron-Leader F. R. D. Swain, a Farnborough test pilot who had just broken the world altitude record. Swain told Mitchell that, as he flew round in lazy circles, with a view of the English coastline from Land's End to the Wash, he had nearly suffocated and had to cut a window in his airtight helmet so he could breathe. In subsequent episodes,
Picture Page
featured the bagpipes player from Trafalgar Square, the London taxi driver who had taken a fare to John O'Groats and a silkworm that died of stage fright before it could be interviewed. Gander was so captivated that he watched every programme from the first to the fiftieth, before he went on holiday and broke his run.
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