Armchair Nation (7 page)

Early viewers seem to have shared Gander's tastes. In broadcasts around Christmas 1936, the owners of television sets were asked to ‘let the BBC know of their existence' by sending their names and addresses to Broadcasting House on a postcard marked ‘viewer' – one of the first official uses of this term. The BBC then wrote back to them asking for feedback. By the following June, they had received 118 letters. The least popular programmes were studio demonstrations of cooking, washing and ironing, ‘which were condemned as of little interest to those who could afford television sets'. The most popular were plays, outside broadcasts and
Picture Page
, which was making Thursday ‘stay at home night'.
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There were now over a hundred public viewing rooms dotted around London, including at a basement gallery at the Science Museum in South Kensington and EMI's Abbey Road studios. The General Electric Company also installed a set at a home for deaf and dumb people at Erith, south-east London. It was shown first to about thirty men who, as a fashion parade appeared on the screen, turned to each other and put their thumbs up. They followed intently a showing of zoo animals, a news bulletin and a short play, and applauded warmly at the end. ‘For the great bulk of deaf people wireless has been quite useless,' said the home's superintendent. ‘These experiments with television suggest that it can fill a great gap in their lives.'
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Many shops and hotels had also installed television. The
Radio Times
reported in March 1937 that in the television rooms of the big department stores ‘there are still large crowds every day, though the numbers have dropped since the beginning of the year, when special arrangements had to be made to control the crowds'. Bernard Buckham in the
Daily Mirror
had heard about ‘a poor couple who go to a London store every day and watch the programme through. It is certainly a cheap amusement.' In the summer of 1937, Michael Barry, the young artistic producer of the Croydon Repertory Theatre, saw television at Kennards department store on the high street, where the afternoon broadcast was shown in the sports section on the first floor. ‘I stood behind a couple of dozen spectators crowded into a hessian booth and strained to watch, beyond their heads, midget dancers
jiggling about on a small screen,' Barry wrote half a century later. ‘It was, I thought, quite the silliest thing I had seen.'
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On the morning of 3 May 1937, a mobile television van pulled up beside the grass at Apsley Gate on Hyde Park Corner. The BBC cameraman pointed his equipment at the passing crowds, Monday's late-running commuters and sundry pedestrians. Alexandra Palace engineers stared at their sets. Through a slight blur, they saw the trees waving in the breeze and the Household Cavalry riding on Rotten Row. Passing cars came sharply into focus with even the registration numbers readable. Passers-by gazed confusedly into the camera. A young woman, oblivious to viewers, put on her lipstick. For two hours the engineers tested on a closed circuit. Then at 12.45 p.m. they decided to televise Hyde Park to whoever happened to be looking in, ringing up their wives in their suburban homes and telling them to turn on the set. Those who switched on saw a bright sunny day in the park. A man lit a cigar and smoked it and a little girl, in the middle of a riding lesson, sat awkwardly in the saddle. The act of distant looking seemed to transform this routine scene, showing viewers the unnoticed patterns and unstaged reality of daily life – the television camera as camera obscura again.

This strangely gripping programme was just a test for the coronation broadcast nine days later. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, refused his request to allow cameras into Westminster Abbey, the BBC's director of television, Gerald Cock, found the one place in London along the procession where you could get a close-up without interruption: the central plinth of Apsley Gate. While the Post Office laid eight miles of television cable from Alexandra Palace, Cock went to Buckingham Palace and asked King George VI if he would smile into the camera when his carriage passed. The king agreed and wrote on a slip of paper that he kept inside the coach, ‘Look right outside the window at Hyde Park Corner and smile.'
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The coronation crowds were fixated on how close they would get to the new king and queen and how much they would be able to see of them. The must-have item along the processional route was a periscope. When the king smiled directly at viewers, it offered them the proximity and sensation of real life that the crowds craved.

At a Southgate cinema, about a hundred people saw it on one small television, and stood up and cheered at the end. A similar crowd gathered round a set in a marquee at Ranelagh polo ground. Manufacturers' and retailers' estimates that over 50,000 people saw the procession ‘astonished the most hopeful', although the BBC guessed more cautiously at 10,000. A small army of viewers scattered from Ipswich to Brighton had seen, said the corporation, ‘a phenomenon which would have been hailed in any other age either as a miracle or as a piece of witchcraft … Trains were an improvement upon stage coaches; mechanised flight, on ballooning; but television is an improvement on nothing. It is something new under the sun.'
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The most eagerly awaited programmes were outside broadcasts, particularly sport. The BBC was there on Monday 21 June 1937 for the first day at Wimbledon, although the link with Alexandra Palace was difficult because of the hilly terrain in between. To take advantage of the rising ground towards Wimbledon Common, the television signal was sent by cable across the car park to Barker's sports ground, 700 feet from Centre Court – an area now better known as Henman Hill, where fans gather to watch the fate of gallant British losers on a giant TV screen – and transmitted from an aerial on top of the turntable ladder of a London fire engine. Hornsey Central Hospital near Alexandra Palace was right in its way, but the hospital secretary agreed to suspend all diathermy activities (heating internal organs by electric current) while Wimbledon was on so as not to ruin the reception.

As viewers joined the tennis, Bunny Austin, the great almost-champion of Wimbledon and the last of the gentleman amateurs, was stuttering to a win against G. L. Rogers. The court was too big for the screen and the grass-stained ball could barely be distinguished from the grass, but critics stressed the positives. ‘It has seldom been
possible to watch the progress of the ball itself,' conceded one forgiving reviewer. ‘But the strokes and the movements about the court have all been so clearly visible that the absence of the ball has hardly seemed to trouble the viewer after his eyes and his spectator's reactions have become accustomed in a minute or so to the strangeness of it all.'
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On 11 November 1937, the television cameras were at the Cenotaph for a memorable two minutes' silence. Shortly after the last chime of Big Ben had died down, a man broke through the crowd and ran into the road, screaming ‘All this hypocrisy!' and something else that sounded like ‘Preparing for war!' Half a dozen policemen gave chase and, just yards from the prime minister, clambered on top of him and muffled his cries. The man turned out to be Stanley Storey, an ex-serviceman who had escaped from a mental asylum. The TV picture was in long shot so viewers just heard ‘hypocrisy!' and saw the crowd swaying slightly, before it settled back into a vast, uniform mass, with just the background noise of distant traffic, birdsong and shuffling feet. This was why the BBC had lobbied hard in the 1920s to broadcast the silence on radio. It knew that simply shutting down the airwaves for two minutes would not have the same impact as this resonant near-silence. The effect, strangely, was magnified when you could see it. ‘The television cameras make a naturally impressive scene even more impressive,' concluded the
Radio Times
. ‘Watching the Silence, broken by the rustle of falling leaves in Whitehall, is an unforgettable experience.'
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Cyril Carr Dalmaine, viewing the silence in a room above Dorking High Street, had more technical concerns. He felt he was being offered a foretaste of what television would be like when the engineers had sorted out the problem of interference. ‘As cars, buses, lorries outside switched off their engines and came to rest, so did the crackling fade from the sound reception and the spots from the viewing screen, rather as if some unseen smudge had been wiped off a palette,' he wrote. ‘For those two minutes the picture came to us clean, clear and steady – like a photograph.'
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Dalmaine was the real name of Jonah Barrington, the radio critic for the
Daily Express
, and both he and
his newspaper were proselytisers for television. The
Express
had sold some of the first DIY television kits in the early 1930s and, at a time when the BBC was not listing an official reception map, issued its own unofficial ones: a radius around London with dark and light shading to indicate how likely it was you would get a good picture.

Like Gander, Barrington had high expectations of the medium, making it clear how unimpressed he was by the decision to televise the formal opening of the new lift at Alexandra Palace. In August 1937 he organised the
Daily Express
Television Exhibition and visitors came from as far as Penzance and Newcastle to see every make of television set. One woman, peering into one, said how wonderful it had seemed when she was young to hear someone's voice over a telephone: ‘We never thought we'd have anything more marvellous than that, and now here am I, over seventy, seeing someone dancing eight miles away …' A month later, Barrington organised a
Daily Express
exhibition touring the home counties with a television van showing the daily broadcasts, starting at the Grand Theatre, Woking. He inaugurated the exhibition live on television from Alexandra Palace, thus becoming, he claimed, ‘the first man in the world to declare an exhibition open without bothering to be present'.
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The cameras were also there for Neville Chamberlain's arrival at Heston Airport after his meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in September 1938. ‘No one knew what had happened until, stepping from his aeroplane in front of the television cameras, he told them,' said
The Times
. ‘This had a quality of history in the making that no other outside broadcast has equalled.'
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The return from Munich later that month was also televised: this time the result was known and the mood celebratory. The broadcast, on a Friday afternoon, was not pre-announced so perhaps only a few hundred viewers saw the plane circle in the air, land and taxi up to the waiting group of cabinet ministers, and Chamberlain step out smiling. He aimed his famous, fluttering piece of paper at the newsreel cameramen and press photographers, but these viewers were the first to see it, and they could even make out traces of writing. The commentary, broadcast simultaneously on radio, was by a 25-year-old Richard Dimbleby, who had persuaded
BBC News to make him its first ‘News Observer' and who was single-handedly creating a new sort of journalist: the on-the-spot observer with a microphone in his hand. ‘It's a real triumph, this arrival,' Dimbleby said in a fresh, piping voice quite unlike its postwar incarnation. ‘Oh now listen: a very tuneless version of “For he's a jolly good fellow” … Those of you who are looking as well as listening to this will be able to see this …'

Television could still not decide if it was a public spectacle or a domestic hobby. On 23 February 1939, Eric Boon fought Arthur Danahar to retain his British lightweight boxing title at the Harringay Arena, and the fight was shown on BBC television at three London cinemas, the first ever pay-per-view televised sporting event. So large was the crowd at the Monseigneur News Theatre in Leicester Square that about a hundred people swept aside the doormen and charged into the auditorium without paying the steep entry fee of one guinea. Police reinforcements arrived to halt the stampede, but the gatecrashers were allowed to remain. The Marble Arch Pavilion and the Tatler News Theatre in Charing Cross Road were also packed, with people standing along each wall and sitting in the aisles. Some were dressed in evening dress and ermine furs, others in cloth caps and mackintoshes.