by Joe Moran
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’.11 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.’12
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.13
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.’14
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.15
In fact it seems unlikely that Burgess saw the Pirandello on television as he claimed, especially since he wrongly dated it to 1932.16 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.17 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.’18
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.’19
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.20
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.21
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
