Armchair Nation
ALSO BY JOE MORAN
On Roads
Queuing for Beginners
An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
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Copyright © Joe Moran 2013
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ISBN 978 1 84668 391 6
eISBN 978 1 84765 444 1
In memory of my grandmother,
Bridget Moran (1915–2010),
who lived half her life without television
1 Switching on
2 A waking dream
3 A straight pencil-mark up the sky
4 The pale flicker of the Lime Grove light
5 The invisible focus of a million eyes
6 The dance of irrelevant shadows
7 A barrier against the silences
8 The age of warts and carbuncles
9 A glimmer on the dull grey tube
10 Closedown
Notes
Acknowledgements
Picture credits
Index
The worst fate that can befall me is to be stranded in a town without a television set.
In Scandinavia they call it ‘the war of the ants’. We had a black-and-white television set with a tuning dial like a radio, and every time you switched channels you encountered this snowstorm of static, which, if you squinted a bit, resembled black ants scurrying round a white floor. Since we also had an indoor aerial and lived in a valley in the foothills of the Pennines, the television, even when it was meant to be tuned into a channel, could still blight a favourite programme with these random bursts of electromagnetic noise. Switching on the television was not an action to be taken lightly, like flicking a light switch or turning on a tap. There was something fragile and precarious about the way the radio waves had to be picked out of the air, converted into electrons and fired across the cathode ray tube towards the phosphorescent screen – to make, if you were lucky, a moving picture, and if you weren’t, this atmospheric fuzz.
Television in our house was rationed, to half an hour a day. This law was policed inadequately, especially by our merciful mother, but its gesture to austerity was probably a blessing, for without it I would have watched television all the time. I was nearly two when, in January 1972, the telecommunications minister Christopher Chataway brought an end to the last vestige of postwar rationing. The three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, would no longer be limited to 3,330 hours each per year, but could broadcast for as long as they liked. The age of plenty this decision ushered in, which coincided with the arrival of colour TV in most homes (but not ours), is now recalled as a lost age of one-nation television in which the same programmes were watched and loved by huge and diverse audiences, a diasporic national community loosely assembled in 19 million living rooms.
Children were the most voracious viewers. ‘As a child growing up in the early 1970s,’ the author D. J. Taylor has written, ‘I watched television in the way that a whale engulfs plankton: gladly, hectically and indiscriminately.’ The audiences for after-school television were huge (although also fickle, halving when the clocks went forward in the spring as children abandoned it for outdoors). Eighty per cent of British children watched Scooby Doo, a cartoon series in which a gang of teenagers and a cowardly Great Dane drove round in a van solving mysteries, invariably involving petty criminals disguised as ghosts. With this possible exception, children’s TV radiated that well-meaning ethos of healthful activity and curiosity about the world that also informed organisations like the Puffin Club for young readers and Big Chief I-Spy’s tribe of spotters. ‘What would make me happiest,’ said Monica Sims, head of children’s programmes at the BBC about her viewers, ‘would be if they went away.’2
This ethos inspired programmes like Why Don’t You … Switch Off the Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?, which showed children how to make computers from index cards and knitting needles, or build their own hovercraft; Vision On, an inventively visual show for deaf children, which received about 8,000 artworks each week from mostly non-deaf children hoping to be displayed in its gallery; and the collective rituals of the BBC’s flagship children’s programme, Blue Peter, whose pioneering correspondence unit invited viewers to write in with good programme ideas, the reward for which was a coveted shield badge. The letters suggested a keen sense of ownership over the programme. ‘Dear Peter,’ wrote nine-year-old Ronald from Falkirk to the presenter Peter Purves, ‘I liked when you tried to ride a killer whale. I would like to see you try to skin dive and kill a shark. I have liked everything that Blue Peter has done especially that fort that Val made from lollypop sticks.’3 These participatory rituals – tutorials on how to create forts from lollipop sticks or dachshund draught excluders from ladies’ tights and old socks, and charitable appeals for silver paper or milk bottle tops which mysteriously converted into inshore lifeboats or guide dogs for the blind – seemed to be saying implicitly to us that we were not just a statistical aggregate of lots of individual viewers, but a virtual community, an extended family brought together twice weekly in front of the set.
Much of the television meant for adults also seemed to share this incantatory quality, this rhetorical conjuring up of collective life. The teatime magazine programme Nationwide, a Blue Peter for grown-ups which called itself ‘Britain’s nightly mirror to the face of Britain’, corralled the nation into imagined togetherness by segueing from discussions of the IMF bailout to film inserts about Herbie the skateboarding Aylesbury duck. The consumer show That’s Life was a similarly strange miscellany of high street vox pops, funny newspaper misprints and interviews with eccentrics who had invented udder warmers for cows or trained their pet dogs to say ‘sausages’. But surely the oddest collective ritual came on Saturday afternoons between the half-time football scores and the classified results on ITV’s World of Sport, when Dickie Davies introduced the wrestling. ‘Ideally, every bout should tell a little tale,’ wrote the wrestler Jackie Pallo in his revealingly titled memoir, You Grunt, I’ll Groan.4 In each match, the two wrestlers would suffer their share of being held in a headlock that had them slapping the canvas in mock agony, before the baddie, usually identifiable by his leotard, lost – a narrative so simple it could be understood with the sound turned down.
As I have since discovered, there were regular tabloid exposés about the wrestling, so the millions of viewers who did not know it was faked must simply not have wanted to know. The French critic Roland Barthes once observed that wrestling was not a sport at all, but a moral drama in which the audience looked for ‘the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible’.5 It did not matter that the result was fixed, only that good was seen to triumph.
Luke Haines’s 2011 album, Nine and a Half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early ’80s, made while his father was ill as a way of remembering watching World of Sport with him, captures perfectly this sense of the wrestling as its own weird, beguiling and wholly unironic world. Haines recorded the album in his living room with a cheap 1980s keyboard, interweaving old footage of World of Sport moments such as Kendo Nagasaki (aka Peter Thornley from Stoke) being ceremonially unmasked at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in 1977 with fantasies like the sackcloth-wearing, wild-bearded wrestler Catweazle’s false teeth flying out of the TV and landing at Haines’s feet. The wrestling was an extreme example of what was true of most television when I was growing up: it demanded total immersion in its symbolic universe, for looking at it with an outsider’s eye would break the spell and render it meaningless and ridiculous. Television performed a mostly benign confidence trick, convincing us that we believed the same things and were part of the same armchair nation.
This belief in a Pax Britannica of three-channel television, when everyone sat in front of the same programmes, is largely a myth – and like many myths it says as much about our current preoccupations as it does about the television we watched a generation ago. It is partly a lament for the seemingly lost capacity of multichannel television to create shared moments of empathy and understanding. This belief is part of a wider sense that the nation once possessed a common culture that has now fragmented, a persistent idea in British cultural history running all the way from Piers Plowman to T. S. Eliot. Nostalgia being a malleable emotion, each age produces its own version of this myth: many blamed television itself for destroying older forms of communal life when it arrived in most homes in the 1950s. ‘If there is one thing certain about “the organic community”,’ the cultural critic Raymond Williams once wrote, ‘it is that it has always gone.’6
In memories of television, nostalgia often mixes with condescension. It is customary to belittle the experience of watching early TV, in a way that perhaps I have also been guilty of in my own recollections, above. The set took ten minutes to warm up. The screen was as small as a postcard. And when it wasn’t switched on, the TV was hidden away guiltily behind a double door like a triptych, or modestly covered with an antimacassar. It was a time, according to the journalist A. A. Gill, summarising this orthodoxy, ‘when the whole world was in 405 lines, took two minutes to warm up and vanished into a white dot at 11 p.m. after a vicar had told you off’.7 We like to think of early television watchers as naïfs, responding with wide-eyed amazement to what seem to us absurd or antediluvian programmes, from dull monochrome panel shows to the Saturday afternoon wrestling. Thus we unconsciously patronise the viewers of the past, as if we were colonialists wondering at the strange habits of a remote tribe.
This mixture of nostalgia and condescension fails to convey how rich and deep the history of British television is, much of it now surviving only as listings. Even in its early years, when broadcasts took up just a few hours a day, the relentlessness of daily television, combined with the fact that it was mostly live and unrecorded, meant there was far too much of it to enter the sorting house for shared memories. Leafing through old copies of the Radio Times and TV Times is a melancholy activity, an entry into a lost world of spent effort, used-up enjoyment and forgotten boredom. Most television, to which talented, energetic people devoted months or years of their lives, has left momentary imprints on our retinas and slightly less momentary imprints on our brains before vanishing into the uncaring ether.
Any history of watching television inevitably becomes a meditation on the nature of collective memory, for a programme that millions once watched but which has now faded into the atmosphere like a dream is a neat encapsulation of the elusive quality of memory itself. The most banal TV from the past can be extraordinarily evocative. Numerous websites exhaustively dedicate themselves to collating and curating the old connective tissue of television, from continuity announcements to channel idents; there is even a group of devotees that meets every Easter in Leominster to share their enthusiasm for the design aesthetic and incidental music of the television test cards. But most television remains forgotten, and those bits that are remembered are often surrounded by wishful thinking and selective amnesia. What is remembered and forgotten is as revealing as the ‘real’ history of watching television, which is ultimately too vast and unrecorded to be told.
Here, for instance, is one piece of both collective and selective memory. On Saturday 13 November 1965 at 11.19 p.m., on the late night satire show BBC-3, the host, Robert Robinson, asked the critic and literary manager of the National Theatre, Kenneth Tynan, if he would stage a play in which there was sexual intercourse. ‘Oh, I think so certainly,’ replied Tynan, before adding as a seemingly casual afterthought, ‘I mean I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word “fuck” is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.’ This, at least, is the gist of what Tynan said; it was live TV and no one was writing it down. Tynan’s stammer, Private Eye said cruelly, had created the first thirteen-syllable four-letter word in history.8 The studio audience briefly inhaled its collective breath and the discussion carried on regardless.
The moment was too late for the Sunday newspapers but Monday’s were filled with righteous anger. William Barkley of the Daily Express called it ‘the bloodiest outrage I have ever known’ and accused Robinson of wearing a ‘lecherous leer’ after the word was uttered. Barkley, who had stayed up with his family to watch BBC-3, said it was the first time he had ever heard the word used by ‘an adult male in the presence of women’. His wife switched off the television straightaway and said to their 28-year-old daughter, ‘It’s time you went to bed.’ Mary Whitehouse, of the newly formed National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, said Tynan should have his bottom smacked. ‘The BBC should restrict its time to those communicators who are acting from noble motives, if the word still has meaning amid the indifference and irresponsibility thrust down our unwilling throats,’ wrote eight students from the University of Essex Union. ‘If it is incapable of fulfilling this task, the service should cease to demoralise the nation by closing down.’9
Anonymous letters to Tynan were more sinister: ‘You will soon have the sack and my friends and I will be waiting for you to give you the best licking that you have ever had for your behaviour. So be careful and don’t walk alone. We are waiting for you … you disgraceful blighter.’10 Read like this, from the perspective of our apparently liberal and enlightened present, the story runs along familiar lines, gently amusing us that something which today would barely turn a hair once caused such consternation.
But the story is more complicated than it at first appears. Although Tynan is routinely cited as the first person to use the F-word on British television, it had actually been used at least twice before. In June 1956 the playwright Brendan Behan employed it liberally on Panorama during an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge. No viewers protested, perhaps because Behan’s diction was severely impaired by drink, although hundreds rang to complain that they could not understand his Dublin accent. A few years later, just after Ulster Television had begun in 1959, the man with the Sisyphean task of painting the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast appeared live on its teatime magazine programme Roundabout. The interviewer, Ivor Mills, asked if it was ever boring painting the same railings all year round. ‘Of course it’s fucking boring,’ the man replied.11
The channel’s managing director, Brum Henderson, waited anxiously for the inescapable tsunami of complaint to arrive at the studios. In the event, not a single viewer, even in this deeply religious region in which play swings were padlocked on Sundays, rang or wrote in. It is a reminder to historians to display humility in making judgements about the past, for there are things about even our most immediate ancestors that we will never know or understand. Were the viewers of Roundabout simply not paying attention or half-asleep, or did they think the word was such an unlikely thing to hear on a teatime broadcast they assumed they were hallucinating? Is it even possible that, without the collective prompting of other offended people, they were not offended at all?
We do know this: many viewers admired Kenneth Tynan for what one called his ‘four-letter courage’. A Manchester student, Bronwen Lee, wrote to offer ‘moral support in your splendid action against the self-righteous philistines’. A Harlow Labour councillor, Avril Fox, was moved to arrange a meeting of anti-Mary Whitehouse viewers in the Cosmo pub, Bloomsbury. The Cosmo Group against censorship, announced a few days later on the Guardian women’s page, soon had a membership of 500, including clergymen, housewives, a general and ‘one or two Wing Commanders’ – the RAF, according to Fox, being especially anti-Whitehouse. Letters of support poured in from ‘villages and places like Guernsey, with one anguished cry from Neath’. In the country, Fox argued, television played a greater part in people’s lives and they were fiercely opposed to censorship.12
Tynan probably meant to create a reaction. He claimed he had only used an old English word as it came up in the conversation, and to have edited himself would have been patronising to the viewer. Since he wasn’t really answering the question, this seems disingenuous. Robert Robinson thought he had ‘grabbed at notoriety like a child’, and the author Kingsley Amis felt he was ‘just showing off’.13 The BBC issued a qualified apology, pointing out that the word had been used on live TV in a serious discussion, and the controversy died a quick and natural death with no one losing their job over it.
A year before Tynan’s use of the F-word, John Krish had made an affecting film documentary, I Think They Call Him John, which followed a widowed ex-miner living alone in a new London high-rise flat. The film shows him silently pottering round one Sunday, feeding his budgie, cooking two sausages and a potato for lunch, staring out of the window. Then, towards the end, as dusk descends on the flats, John switches on the television and his face is mirrored in the screen as he sits down on a hard-backed chair and waits for the sound, which comes on in the middle of an ad break: ‘For whiteness that shows, she can depend on Persil.’ After the break comes Beat the Clock, the section of Sunday Night at the London Palladium in which couples could win washing machines and fridges for playing silly games like bursting balloons with needles attached to their noses. John unwraps a boiled sweet and pops it in his mouth. ‘I knew you were an Ada!’ cries the instantly familiar voice of Bruce Forsyth, through audience laughter. ‘As soon as you walked on there, I said, that’s an Ada … Oh we do have fun! You have sixty seconds to do this little bit of nonsense, starting from … hold on, hold on, Ada, if you’re going to make a farce of the whole thing …’ John takes out an ironing board and glumly irons a shirt for no one in particular while the programme carries on, his one-sided encounter with Bruce Forsyth being his only human interaction that day.
Despite its veneer of fly-on-the-wall authenticity, the film was actually a set-up: a public service documentary made on behalf of the Samaritans, with Krish calling out careful instructions to his subject. And yet it still seems to me to convey something important and often unspoken about watching television. The elderly widower in Krish’s film had the most minimal relationship possible with Bruce Forsyth; he happened to be in the same room when Forsyth was on the television, which happened to be switched on. The TV audience is a momentary collective like this, an insubstantial gathering across millions of living rooms which anyone can join by making the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set.
But collective memories of watching TV tend to home in instead on those moments, such as Tynan’s use of the F-word, when viewers took offence or were otherwise angered, excited or rapt by television. Indeed, the only continuous record of viewers’ responses deals precisely with these reactions. The BBC was the first television company to begin logging viewers’ calls in a ‘duty log’, not always enthusiastically. ‘We must deal with telephone enquiries,’ said the BBC’s Chief Television Liaison Officer in the early 1950s. ‘For goodness sake, why must they ring? Why can’t they let us get on with our job of putting programmes on the air?’14
When the Television Duty Office moved to the fourth floor of the new Television Centre in White City in the 1960s, the operation became more professional and less obviously irritated by its callers. While two TV sets, one tuned to BBC1 and the other to BBC2, chattered away continually in one corner, the small group of shift-working duty officers scrawled down summative points from calls, before transferring them to two typewriters, one for each channel. In the 1980s the duty log became a cut-and-paste, word processed document, until it was outsourced, at the end of the millennium, to a private company working from a Belfast call centre. All commercial TV stations are also now required by law to keep duty logs.
Duty logs provide a complete record of what was shown on television, including any late runnings and last minute changes, so the police and lawyers regularly use them to check the alibis of suspects who say they were at home watching TV when a crime took place. Alongside the large number of calls from people who clearly phone just to talk to someone (nicknamed ‘lonely hearts’ by the duty officers) they supply a random stream of consciousness about television, although certain things – cruelty to animals, criticism of the royal family or the union flag being flown upside down – will reliably create a reaction. Most calls are simple requests for information about the name of an actor or incidental music, but there are also compliments and, of course, complaints: some sane and reasonable, others idiosyncratic and contrarian and communicated in that tone of suffocating earnestness, pained self-importance and pointless anger that will be familiar to anyone who reads internet message boards.
Just as it would be unwise of future historians to read the anonymous comments on websites as expressions of the collective mentality of our era, it would be equally unwise of us to pore over the duty logs in search of typical viewers. Most of us are not moved to ring up a stranger to let them know what we think about what we are watching. After a few false starts, the English language settled on the word ‘watch’ to describe what people do in front of televisions. But ‘watch’, which shares its origins with ‘wake’ and conveys associations of keenly looking and keeping guard, is not always the right word to denote our relationship to the TV set. Much viewing is absent-minded or indifferent, and even the intense feelings that the TV generates are usually fleeting and soon forgotten. Television’s greater significance in our lives surely stems from its slowly accrued habits and rituals, the way it mingles with our other daily routines and comes to seem as natural as sleeping and waking.
Britain’s single time zone and its small number of channels have meant that television, in its ways of talking to its viewers, has assumed that it represents ‘the private life of the nation state’, to use the critic John Ellis’s phrase.15 But viewers in Lerwick or St Helier have watched television with a different eye and ear to those in London (except during the substantial part of television’s history when they were not able to watch it at all). Television has served as a distorted mirror through which to reflect on what defines the nation, and the nation’s margins. So I have tried to tell the story that follows through the voices of those who have watched television in different parts of the islands, without presuming the existence of some imagined, scattered, national community brought together in front of the set. This book is mostly about individuals in specific places, usually but not always sitting in living rooms, watching TV and reflecting on what they see.
Yet I have also found that there is another kind of armchair nation – not perhaps the united, countrywide family that primetime television assumes it is addressing, but a more improvised community of viewers, formed wordlessly and unconsciously through collective habits and behaviours. Aerials and satellite dishes spring up silently on roofs, living-room curtains close, streets and roads empty of people and cars, the tills in public houses are stilled and the boiling of kettles synchronises across the nation – all because people are watching television. Precisely because it is so fragile and intangible and demands so little of those who belong to it, the armchair nation can create a sense of commonality among people who may have little else in common. And perhaps this collective habit of watching TV, which has taken up so much of our waking lives, can tell us something about who we are and what matters to us.
There are words which are ugly because of foreignness or ill-breeding (e.g. television).
‘Oxford Street … is a forcing house of sensation,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay for Good Housekeeping magazine in 1928. ‘The great Lords of Oxford Street are as magnanimous as any Duke or Earl who scattered gold or doled out loaves to the poor at his gates. Only their largesse takes a different form. It takes the form of excitement, of display, of entertainment, of windows lit up by night, of banners flaunting by day.’2 Woolf often shopped at Selfridge’s, at the street’s western end. From the moment you entered on the ground floor, with its heady perfume counter designed to disguise the bouquet of horse manure and other noxious gases from the street outside, Selfridge’s was meant to be a profusion of scents, sights and sounds. It displayed Louis Blériot’s plane on its lower ground floor the day after his cross-channel flight in July 1909, and Ernest Shackleton’s twenty-two-foot boat, the James Caird, on its roof in February 1920.
The American owner, Harry Selfridge, was looking for another attraction to celebrate the opening of his western extension and the store’s sixteenth birthday. On a tip-off, he visited John Logie Baird’s Soho workshop and asked him to come and demonstrate his new invention. And so, one Wednesday morning in March 1925, in the electrical department on the first floor, this diffident-looking man in wire-rimmed glasses set up an odd contraption in one corner, assembled from such items as old cycle lamps, coffin wood and a biscuit tin (Rich Mixed), at the end of which was a rapidly spinning disc and a ‘danger’ sign. ‘The House of Selfridge has always gone out of its way to encourage other pilgrims on the Road of Progress,’ announced Callisthenes, Selfridge’s column in The Times. ‘And this picturesque apparatus with its cardboard and its bicycle chain is in direct succession to Blériot’s gallant monoplane and Shackleton’s brave boat.’3
Television was a dream long before it was a fact. This Greco-Latin word, coined in French and borrowed by the English language in 1907, means ‘far sight’. Television was meant to defeat distance, to show events happening at the same time somewhere else. For centuries people had fantasised about the instantaneous journey of sound and vision across space. For St Augustine, the epitome of this incorporeal, telepathic communication was the angel, a word that means ‘messenger’. The holiest mortals were also thought to have this power. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order of Poor Clares, was supposed, from her convent sickbed in Christmas 1252, to have watched midnight mass in the Basilica of St Francis a few miles away, projected on to the wall of her room. In 1958, Pope Pius XII declared this miracle to be the first television broadcast and named Clare the patron saint of television.
In a world that takes instant communication as read, we forget how much our ancestors worried about everything being so far away from everything else and obsessed about the annihilation of distance. The early moderns often longed for some form of miraculous overcoming of the rootedness of the human body and the tiresomely dispersed physical world. ‘If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, Injurious distance should not stop my way,’ writes the lovelorn poet of Shakespeare’s 44th sonnet. Shakespeare’s contemporary, Robert Greene, invented a ‘magic mirror’ for spying on others in his Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (c. 1592). Someone at the BBC must have noted this work’s prophetic quality because in 1953, when the corporation broadcast an ‘Elizabethan night’ imagining what television would have been like in 1592, the centrepiece was a performance of Greene’s play.
The harnessing of electricity revived this long-nurtured dream of instantaneous contact. The unstated ambition of modern media, the American philosopher John Durham Peters argues, has been to ‘mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means’.4 In the late nineteenth century, new inventions like telegraphy, the telephone and the phonograph had a near-mystical aura. The popular imagination linked them with those other late Victorian obsessions, mesmerism and telepathy, for they too seemed to fulfil the desire for an angelic communion, breaking down the painful distance between self and other. Einstein’s discovery that the speed of light was the fastest thing in the universe, on any earthly scale as good as instant, gave the dream a new impetus. Television was sometimes called ‘seeing by electricity’, and a moving human face reproduced at the speed of light on a screen seemed a form of miraculous double presence, unlike the dead shadows of the cinema, which simply recreated something that had once been but was no more. The earliest television viewers compared what they saw to visitations and apparitions. In the late 1920s, when engineers noticed that a duplicate radio signal could create a displaced, repeated image on the television screen, they naturally called it a ‘ghost’.
During the week of its sixteenth birthday celebrations, a million people came through Selfridge’s doors. Baird’s demonstration was just one attraction in a series of exhibitions including a Japanese garden and displays of the earliest gramophone, first editions of Dickens and Queen Victoria’s old stockings. Sales assistants on the first floor handed out leaflets to shoppers: ‘The apparatus here demonstrated is, of course, absolutely “in the rough” … The picture is flickering and defective, and at present only simple pictures can be sent successfully; but Edison’s first phonograph rendered that “Mary had a little lamb” in a way that only hearers who were “in the secret” could understand and yet, from that first result has developed the gramophone of today …’5
At first, television asked a large imaginative leap of its viewers. Baird demonstrated his machine to small crowds, who looked through a cardboard viewfinder, rather as one might view a coin-operated telescope on the end of the pier. The four-by-two-inch screen displayed a quivering silhouette of simple shapes like the letter ‘H’ printed in white on black card, broadcast from a few feet away. ‘It was a little disappointing really,’ recalled Elisabeth Wood, then a schoolgirl, sixty years later, ‘because there were black lines sort of wiggling across it. And it jumped up and down. And then we all clapped rather politely but we were all rather frightened of television. We believed if they could make this film they could see into our houses.’ An eighteen-year-old South African music student, Margaret Albu, was coerced into viewing the demonstration by her mother. ‘The invention had the effect which all mechanical things have on me and gave me a feeling of bewilderment and nausea,’ said the young woman (who would later marry its inventor).6 Giving three demonstrations a day for three weeks to queues of shoppers who seemed politely interested rather than astounded, Baird came down with nervous exhaustion and spent several weeks in bed.
But Harry Selfridge was sufficiently impressed that, on 20 February 1928, he invited Baird to open the world’s first television department at his store. The Baird ‘Televisors’, encased in mahogany cabinets and priced at £6 10s. 1d., sold sluggishly compared to the electric gramophones and self-winding watches that went on display the same day. Shoppers seemed most excited about the Photomatons, the new photo-me-booths installed at the head of the escalators in the Bargain Basement, where they queued in their hundreds, sat on stools and received, a few minutes later, a strip of photos for a shilling. But Selfridge, an early adopter of new technology, knew which was the more exciting development. ‘This is not a toy,’ he said of television. ‘It is a link between all peoples of the world.’7
The BBC, its energies directed at the still young and growing medium of radio, was a reluctant television broadcaster. ‘The impression is of a curiously ape-like head, decapitated at the chin, swaying up and down in a streaky stream of yellowy light,’ said a BBC report of a demonstration at Baird’s tiny studio in Long Acre, Covent Garden, in September 1928. ‘I was reminded of those human shrunken heads favoured by such persons as Mr M. Hedges [the explorer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges]. Not even the collar or tie were visible, the effect being more grotesque than impressive … The faces of those leaving the show showed neither excitement or interest. Rather like a Fair crowd who had sported 6d. to see if the fat lady was really as fat as she was made out to be.’8 The Post Office engineers present were less dismissive, and asked the BBC to allow Baird to use its transmitter, conveniently located on the roof of Selfridge’s, for more tests. And so on 30 September 1929, at 11.04 a.m., after a fifteen-minute radio talk entitled ‘How I Planned My Kitchen’ by Miss Sydney M. Bushell, the BBC transmitted an experimental programme, broadcast simultaneously on radio and television.
Images from the BBC’s first scheduled television programme travelled by landline from Baird’s studio at Long Acre, Covent Garden to the Selfridge’s transmitter, from where they were radiated on carrier waves. After speeding silently and invisibly along a diagonal line south-east, over the oblivious shoppers and pedestrians of Regent Street and the intricate alleyways of Soho, they arrived back at Long Acre, where a small crowd of invited guests watched them on a screen about an inch and a half long and half an inch wide. The Yorkshire comedian Sydney Howard delivered a comic monologue, Lulu Stanley sang ‘He’s tall, and dark, and handsome’ and Baird’s secretary, Connie King, sang ‘Mighty Like a Rose’. Each of the performers had to sit on a typist’s chair to meet the gaze of the scanning beam, with the tiny Miss King raised on a pile of telephone directories. The pictures and sound could not yet be synchronised and so each person was televised in silence and then repeated themselves in front of a microphone. Asked after the broadcast how many people had seen it, Baird guessed there were nine of his televisors dotted around London and about twenty built by intrepid amateurs from scratch: twenty-nine in all.9
People were fascinated, in a way that we would also be were we not inured to it through habit, by this strange phenomenon, the radio wave, which could race through all intervening obstacles and show distant events at the moment they were occurring, undetectable without that magical deciphering machine, a wireless or television receiver. One of the radio wave’s great charms was that, unlike the telephone or the telegraph, it radiated to no one in particular. The earliest term for viewers was ‘lookers in’, which, like the radio term ‘listeners in’, suggested they were eavesdropping on something not meant solely for their eyes and ears.
The word ‘broadcasting’, which radio borrowed about a hundred years ago from the farmer’s term for scattering seeds over a wide surface rather than neatly in rows, carried the same connotations of chance. Anyone with a televisor could tune in and pluck these animated images out of apparently empty space. The low frequency microwaves on which this primitive television was broadcast travelled vast distances, even though the transmitter was weak. One day in the autumn of 1929, a young Bessarabian engineer, Boris Alperovici, sat in a darkened room in a villa in the volcanic peaks of Capri, at a workbench surrounded with radio and TV equipment. He had read about Baird’s broadcasts in a technical journal and had straightaway ordered two sets from England, one to pick up sound and the other vision. At first he could not get the sets past Italian customs because they did not recognise such a thing as television; but after much cajoling, they let them travel by boat from Naples to Capri. Alperovici assembled them in his radio workshop at the villa and waited for the tests to start. The first thing he saw, on a screen slightly bigger than a postage stamp spewing ugly red light from the cathode ray, was Gracie Fields. Twenty-three years later, Alperovici and Fields married, after Fields’s nephew had knocked on his door in Capri, where Fields had a villa, and asked if he could fix his aunt’s radio.10
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 22Brave New WorldThe Last Election