Armchair Nation (9 page)

One June afternoon in 1939, seventy-five couples, chosen by ballot from the 700 who had applied, attended a ‘television tea party' at Broadcasting House. Television's stars – Joan Miller, Jasmine Bligh, Elizabeth Cowell and Leslie Mitchell – wore ‘stop me and ask one' identity buttons affixed to their coat lapels and handed out smoked salmon sandwiches, cakes and buns. Sitting in the raked, padded seats of the hall, the viewers plied Gerald Cock with questions. ‘Why,' asked a man at the back, ‘can't the evening's programme be given on the screen to save me looking it up in the
Radio Times
?' This was a matter for the engineers, replied Cock. ‘Why is it that the television orchestra so often drowns the soloists?' Cramped studio space, came the answer. ‘Why can't the morning demonstration film be changed?'
Because it cost £3,000 to make, Cock said. When he mentioned
Picture Page
, spontaneous applause filled the hall.
⁶¹

‘Of course
Picture Page
is our favourite,' said one woman to Grace Wyndham Goldie, attending for the
Listener
. ‘And the plays. I do like the plays. Except the Insect Play. I didn't understand what that was all about. And I don't like the foreign films they put on sometimes. But the rest's splendid. It's all so friendly.' Goldie noted the enormous popularity of the announcers who also doubled up as interviewers and stunt people, having their palms read by chirologists or being rescued from burning buildings in fire displays. As the admiration for the announcers attested, television was already more informal than radio. Radio conversation at this time was often scripted, and Hilda Matheson, the BBC's director of talks, complained that many speakers read their scripts in a ‘parsonical drone'. On television, by contrast, the announcers could not read from a script if they wanted to look at the viewer, and could not see much in the glare of the lights anyway, so they had to learn to be natural. Television's stars, reflected Goldie, would be ‘the people who make direct contact with its small audiences. In other words, they will be the talkers not the actors, the Howard Marshalls not the Clark Gables.'
⁶²

With war approaching, Radiolympia in August 1939 was subdued. The main attraction was ‘Television Avenue', a township of stands along which hundreds of different makes of set were arrayed. Mr Middleton tended a life-sized recreation of his Alexandra Palace garden and there was a huge model of the palace, sixty-five feet high, with miniature cameras and other equipment inside, like a giant doll's house. The radio trade predicted that 100,000 sets would be in homes by Christmas.
⁶³

Programmes remained light until the end: an alternative reality radiating from the northern heights. At Radiolympia on 1 September, with Germany having invaded Poland earlier that morning, Elizabeth
Cowell interviewed the Misses Reilly on ‘all year round bathing' and Mr J. McIntyre on ‘impressions of English life as seen by a West Indian', and Joe Loss and his band played ‘If I had a talking picture of you'. As the evacuation of schoolchildren held up traffic out of London, a Disney cartoon,
Mickey's Gala Premiere
, was shown in full (and not, as legend has it, breaking up into static halfway through). Some test signals followed and, at around 12.35 p.m., closedown. The
Radio Times
, which went on sale that day, fleshed out the programmes for the coming week: a ‘television fashion display', a programme about swans in literature, art and music which ‘will be frankly highbrow, so don't switch on if your appreciation of bird life is limited to Donald Duck', and ‘Interest Film: West of Inverness'. But a special issue of
Radio Times
issued three days later entitled ‘Broadcasting Carries On!', made no mention of television at all.
⁶⁴
The first casualty of war was the TV listings.

By October, as the phoney war dragged on, the BBC had received hundreds of letters asking for television to resume. ‘Most of the letters say that, having got used to television, owners of now useless sound and vision receivers find that ordinary sound programmes are unsatisfying and not worth switching on to hear,' said a speaker at the AGM of Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd in December. ‘With the present conditions prevailing in the London area, particularly at night, there is a real need for television.'
⁶⁵
The BBC's stock reply was that television had been withdrawn for reasons of national security, the characteristic sound of the Alexandra Palace transmitter making it useful as a direction finding point for enemy aircraft. Most of the television engineers went to work developing radar, and those who remained to look after Alexandra Palace deployed its sound transmitter in what Winston Churchill named the ‘battle of the beams', using it to jam the high-frequency radio waves which German bombers used to guide themselves on to targets. The only people watching television in Britain during the war were members of British intelligence, tuning in to German TV broadcasts drifting over from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The
BBC Handbook
for 1940 plaintively recounted a brief, golden
hour it was not sure would return. ‘To talk of the television programmes during those last eight months of the service is to stir wistful memories,' wrote the BBC press officer, Ernest Thomson, as Britain entered its darkest days of the war. ‘We throw a glance nowadays at the blank screens of our receivers and remember when they held us like a spell. We recall the constantly changing scene: Royal processions, tennis at Wimbledon, comedies and thrillers in the studios, the big fights at Harringay and Earl's Court, the living portraits of “Picture Page” … and we ask with Keats, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” … One day, we may hope that eager striving band of specialists will reassemble under their queer, futuristic mast in Alexandra Park to resume the world's first high-definition television service. But whether that happens soon or late, we had our glorious hour. Television was here – You Couldn't Shut Your Eyes to It.'
⁶⁶

A day in bed … Watched television with Joyce and Cole. What a hideous and horrid invention
.

Noel Coward, 4 January 1947
¹

On Saturday 6 October 1945, Nella Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness, decided to make the most of the last weekend before the clocks went back for winter by making a shopping expedition to Kendal. ‘I saw my first television set but was not very thrilled,' she confided to her diary, written for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. ‘The screen was so tiny any performers would have looked like dolls.' Nella was looking through a shop window at a dead screen. Broadcasts had not yet resumed after the end of the war and, even if they had, the signal would not have reached the Lake District from Alexandra Palace. ‘To most people with pre-war television sets, and many who hoped to be viewers in the near future, the year opened in delicious mystery,' wrote the
BBC Yearbook
of 1946, ‘but viewers-to-be were wondering what was really happening beneath that spindly, bristling aerial-mast on London's northern heights.'
²

It was not until 7 June 1946, a year after VE Day, that television returned, just in time to broadcast the Victory Parade. At twenty-one years old, Miss Beryl Romaril, of Grenoble Gardens, Palmers Green,
gained brief renown as the vision mixer at Alexandra Palace who was to turn the knob that faded up the first pictures for six years. The newspaper headline, ‘Beryl to turn on television: 20,000 are waiting', probably overestimated the viewing figures. On that first night, the BBC showed a dramatic adaptation of a piece of French resistance underground fiction called
The Silence of the Sea
about an elderly man and his niece in occupied France forced to take in as a lodger a cultured German officer (Kenneth More), who talked about his desire for friendship between their two nations. After a trip to Paris he returned disillusioned with Nazism and left to fight on the Eastern Front, saying he was ‘off to Hell'. ‘It was a very touching and moving play,' remembered Peter Sallis, then a RADA student watching it on his parents' set in Leigh-on-Sea, ‘and many years later when I was working with Kenny More, I told him I had seen it and he could hardly believe it. I think I was the only person, apart from close members of his family, who had ever seen
The Silence of the Sea
.'
³

A slight exaggeration: Iain Logie Baird, television curator at the National Media Museum in Bradford, estimates that about 3,000 sets were lost to the Luftwaffe's bombs, and a few more refused to work after hibernating for so long, so there were perhaps about 15,000 working televisions. John Logie Baird, Iain's grandfather, had died of a coronary thrombosis on 14 June 1946, aged 58, a week after television resumed, an event that he had been excitedly anticipating. It was his company that had successfully shown the BBC pictures of the Victory Parade on big screens at the Savoy and Grosvenor House Hotels, but Baird was too ill to attend. He died at his rented home on Station Road in Bexhill-on-Sea, outside of the range of television. Even when television did reach the Sussex coast in the early 1950s, reception in Baird's old street was said to be terrible.
⁴
After its reopening, television received scant coverage in the thin, paper-rationed newspapers of the time, and its performers must often have felt, like Kenneth More, that they were speaking into a void. New television sets started to be made again in the autumn of 1946, but shortages of wood for the cabinets and glass for the cathode ray tubes severely limited production.

On 10 February 1947, in the middle of the harshest winter anyone
could remember and an acute coal shortage, television was cancelled for over a month. ‘I am assured on reliable authority,' wrote John Ware of Chelsea, one of the few aggrieved set owners, in a letter to
The Times
, ‘that the total power consumption of a whole day's television transmission is approximately equal to that of one hour of any one of the sound broadcast transmissions.' But most of the country was far more worried about the rationing of the use of fires and stoves than a television service limited to a few hours a day and to the south-east of England. ‘Last evening I and W went into the Sparks, next door, to wish them a Happy New Year and to look at their television picture of the Cinderella pantomime,' wrote an underwhelmed Herbert Brush, a retired electricity board inspector living in Sydenham with two female housemates, in his Mass Observation diary on New Year's Day 1948. ‘My eyes are not good enough to see such a small picture well, but as, according to the announcer, it was the first time they have televised a theatre with its own light, perhaps I did not see the television under the best conditions.'
⁵

The first intimation that television might be waking from its long period of torpor came with the London Olympics in the summer of 1948. Since most sporting events refused permission to film, until then television had been reduced to showing tug-of-war, Japanese sword-play, ping-pong and amateur football from Barnet. There were huge attendances for live sport since, with rationing still in place, rising disposable income tended to be spent on leisure. But the public's sporting tastes were domestic: league football, horse racing and county cricket. That summer's big event was Don Bradman's farewell tour of England in the Ashes. The Olympics, an international event that happened to be staged in Britain, was not anticipated with much relish.

Yet viewers soon found themselves caring about the fate of little-known athletes competing in unfamiliar events. The new Emitron cameras had a revolving lens turret with a close-up, medium-range and long shot, so they could follow runners all the way round the track. They were nearly as sensitive as the human eye, making outside broadcasts possible even in fading light, although the picture then tended to peel off from the corners like a sepia-tinted photograph. Viewers saw clear, velvety images of the giant Jamaican RAF war hero, ‘Art' Wint,
pounding the ground in grief after pulling a muscle and losing his team the 400 metres relay; the housewife and mother, Fanny Blankers-Koen, bringing victory for Holland in the 100 metres relay with her last stride; and the exhausted Belgian Étienne Gailly being heartbreakingly overtaken on the marathon's final lap. Even better pictures came from the Empire Pool, where swimmers were brought before the Emitrons still breathless and wet. The BBC's director general, William Haley, lukewarm about the new medium, was staying in a hotel in Devon and was astonished to overhear new arrivals from London talking animatedly about having seen the games on television in their homes.
⁶