We tend to think of television as a technology of the Fifties, but it has an intricate and wonderful history through the 1930’s, full of idealism, desperate invention, and unintended comedy. It is a terrific story, in which the technology slowly condensed from a collective hive mind of buzzing visionaries and inventors. I have already looked at the role of the Nazis; here I am interested in some of the Pythonesque parts of the British story.

The first television service in the UK started in 1929, with the mechanical system developed by John Logie Baird. Then it seemed promising, and alternative electronic systems much harder to develop, but trash hindsight makes it ludicrously inadequate. Running on thirty lines, seen through a magnifying glass, the bandwidth was initially so low that the daily half hour show was transmitted in eight minute blocks, with the sound first, and then the picture.

Performers wore a bizarre makeup scheme, with a pure white face, black highlights on shadows to create such salient details as a nose and lips, and silver around the eyes. All to stop them looking like an over-exposed egg.

By 1932, the BBC had taken over transmission. Upgrading to new “high definition” broadcasts in 1936, it was confronted with competing claims from Baird, with his whirling disk in the studio, and Marconi-EMI, using a cathode ray tube, which the company had managed to turn into a practical system. The nabobs simply allowed the two systems to run on alternate weeks, except for Sundays, when God wanted neither. It was the simplest kind of test – in an orgy of fairness, the BBC performed the opening ceremony twice, so it could be transmitted by both systems.

Baird used a telecine system, running at 180 lines, which filmed the camera image, processed it on the spot, rerecorded it immediately, and broadcast the picture 54 seconds later.

As a wonderful account in Tony Currie’s book British Television 1930-2000 says, the system “relied on a ghastly combination of whirling and grinding mechanics and baths of cyanide and water!” The hydraulic noises were broadcast along with the show, and the whole thing looked like a row of generator sets for a tiny power station.

After six months, Baird’s Heath Robinson system was considered too unreliable, and sanity prevailed. (Ironically, the disc arrangement reappeared in colour television technologies and still has specialised applications today).

With a giant mast atop Alexandra Palace, the nascent BBC TV used both ridiculously small studios, to produce shows like Here’s Looking at You, which opened in 1936 with “singer Helen Mackay …, two tap dancers, a three man vocal group, a pantomime horse – and the BBC Television Orchestra.”

By1939, the BBC had broadcast the coronation of King George VI (or at least the movement outside the cathedral) the FA Cup Final, Wimbledon, and daily newsreels, and had an output deal for two daily cartoons from Walt Disney. There were 500 staff, broadcasting to 20,000 sets with an estimated 100,000 viewers.

Then – and this is the point of the post – the Nazis invaded Poland, and the defence planners realised that a broadcasting antenna was the perfect homing beacon for German bombers.

“At just past noon on 1 September 1939, after an extra, uncheduled Mickey Mouse cartoon, the announcer trailed the afternoon’s Mantovani programme and a later Galsworthy play, and bade viewers good afternoon. Twenty minutes of test pattern and tone followed. Ally Pally then fell silent for the duration of the Second World War.”

The cartoon was Mickey’s Gala Premiere, a kind of self-advertisement, which featured a galaxy of cartoonised contemporary America stars, with Greta Garbo saying an indistinct last line which was either, “I tank ah go home” or “I tank ah kiss you”.

The evacuation was so swift that people were said to have left their undrunk cups of tea in offices. The mast was later used to broadcast decoy signals to confuse German radar, and “shatter the confidence” of their pilots in the system.

BBC TV scheduled its rebirth for June 7th 1946, in order to televise the Victory Day celebrations the next day. As a matter of policy, they simply started where they had left off, by broadcasting the shows announced but never run on September 1st, 1939.

So, at 3pm in the afternoon, the snow on the television sets disappeared to reveal pre-war announcer Jasmine Bligh standing outside Ally Pally. With no record of the television signal, we have to rely on a newsreel to know her actual words, which were, “Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh? Well here we are after a lapse of nearly seven years ready to start again and of course we are all terribly excited and thrilled.”

Along with other solemn bits, the transmission then repeated the Mickey Mouse cartoon, followed by Mantovani and ultimately Levanda, the foot juggler which audiences had awaited for seven difficult years. Somewhere in here, the Postmaster General, the Earl of Listowel, tried to inspire the audience by telling them, “They will gain from a nationwide television service fresh mental inspiration, and a more vivid awareness of the greatness of their country, as well as pleasure and relaxation after a long day’s work.”

No-one knows how many people saw that broadcast, or could actually remember Jasmine Bligh. Those twenty thousand pre-war sets had been useless for seven years, and had survived the Blitz and the frantic movements of the war. Maybe some had been tenderly preserved as an article of faith in the return of peace.

And what of John Logie Baird? Perhaps he was not as ridiculous as he is often depicted in our wearied times.

“Baird continued developmental work on color television, now making use of cathode-ray technology, and achieved 600-line experimental color telecasts by 1940. He continued his effort to perfect large-screen projection color television during the war, along with some apparent work for the British military. But his health, never strong, gave out and he died in 1946.”

In August 1939, just before the war started and his company collapsed due to the sudden lack of interest in civilian fripperies, he wrote this about the future of television:

“What will be the next development? I think it will be television in colour. As far back as 1928 I showed a little flickering picture in colour at the British Association meeting, and have recently taken up this work intensively. We showed a 12-foot colour television picture at the Dominion Theatre in 1938, and are now applying it to the cathode ray tube. This development is still in the experimental stage, and it may be some considerable time before it can be available for commercial purposes.

And what after colour? Stereoscopic relief, so that the picture stands out in three dimensions, is not outside practicability. It has already been achieved experimentally, and taking a long flight into the future the television picture to come will be one in full colour and with stereoscopic relief. Television also will undoubtedly be applied to the telephone, so that we shall be able to see as well as hear our caller…”

The whole story, from a Google extract, is pretty terrific, though it is so insular it completely fails to mention the ferment of development in Europe and North America during the 1930’s, part of which I described. The actual newsreel of the restart is available on the net.

There is a cute page about Ally Pally in the pioneering days , complete with a cutaway diagram showing the competing studios. With another version here.

The image on the left above genuinely is the first BBC broadcast logo, deployed when Baird took over two radio transmitters for his tests in 1929. I like the way the design reflects contemporary Deco/Constructivist trends, though I suspect it is a fairly literal rendition of airwaves and a Nipkow Disc. I would love to see the original colour image.

Almost everyone dates the BBC logos to much later, sometimes citing the Batwing Logo designed by the British design doyen Abram Games in 1953. His whirling brass contraption was wonderful but 24 years too late.

The Transdiffusion site is a treasure trove of British TV history, with some key articles about this period, including a detailed description of Baird and his researches as his company came under the control of Gaumont, built a large independent laboratory and studio at Crystal Palace, continued after it burnt down and the BBC rejected his system, and slowly ejected its founding genius.

I can’t resist Baird’s own description of his first encounter with alcohol in 1926, finally breaking the habit of his Scottish religious family. He had just set up his own company to develop the mechanical television system -

“Hutchey and I lunched together; it was the high spot of the day. Commencing with cocktails we went through hors d’oeuvres, rich pea soup, fritto misto, curried chicken and Bombe Gladys Cooper, washed down with copious draughts of Chateau Y’quem, followed by coffee and petits-fours washed down with Bisque d’Bouche Brandy. Gorged and bloated and belching, we tottered over to Motograph House and awaited afternoon tea. Those were the days!

But they were too good to last. The cold weather arrived and I caught my usual winter chill, but this time it was complicated by liver and other disorders. I did not throw it off properly. Alarming symptoms developed, my nose swelled to twice its normal size and became a vivid crimson, and I suffered from acute catarrh. I consulted a specialist and was warned to avoid in future all wine and rich food. The Ivy days were over.”

With all his travails, the poor man never even had a decent feed again.

———–
In 1927, while fiddling with the visible light spectra to maximise the sensitivity of the very imperfect early apparatus, Baird experimented with infra-red radiation. This is his description:

“At this time, my only assistant was the office boy imported from Hutchinson’s soap works. He was ignorant but amiable. The ultra-violet rays hurt his eyes, but he did not complain, but I got a fright and tried the infra-red. At first I used electric fires to produce these infra-red rays which are practically heat rays. I could not get a result and added more fires until Wally was practically roasted alive. Then I put a dummy’s head in and added more fires until the head went up in flames.

I decided to try another tack and used the shorter infra-red rays. To get this I used ordinary electric light bulbs covered with thin ebonite which cut-off all light but allowed the infra-red to pass. Wally sat under this without discomfort and after one or two adjustments I saw him on the screen although he was in total darkness. That again was a thrill, new and strange. I was actually seeing the person without light.”

He called the system “Noctovision” and gave exhibitions to great excitement. Though wartime use was anticipated and he conducted substantial experiments for some years, he was left in a peculiar position in relation to his main interest, television. He now had a system which worked best if the actors performed in total darkness, while colours glowed in disconcerting ways. Fortunately, he found ways of using visible light, thus avoiding a period in television history in which acting was a suitable profession for blind people.

From an extract of John Logie Baird: Television Pioneer by R.W. Burns.

He was an amazing man, you know. And on the second of October, 1925, he did manage to create the very first transmitted image of a human being, even though it was wobbly and imperfect.

——

Levanda, by the way, called herself a “foot equilibrist”, was married to Chick Robini, a circus accordionist act, and was closely related to George Rowe, the Green Lizard. She and her daughter Van had an act at the Glasgow Emporium in 1953 called “Feats With The Feet”. In the early Thirties, her act was this –

Noted at the Palladium, London, in 1932, billed as ‘The only lady foot equilibrist in the world’. Her juggling act involved cumbersome and outsized objects of very different weight, including boards, balls, clubs and barrels. The board, in the shape of a giant playing-card, weighed 20lbs. One of her brothers acted as her assistant.

There is a newsreel clip for 1935 in which she juggles a barrel with her feet, but there is no preview in the current beta version of the new ITN archive site.

She worked through the war and into the fifties, disappeared for a while, and returned in the next decade with her daughter, when she must have been an athletic lady of mature years.

She is mentioned in a hilarious list of music hall acts by the giant Dr Who actor, Michael Kilgarriff, full of wonderful paras like this:

“Others to assume the appellation Human Fly have been Charles Bliss (1826-06), Olav Czarnowski (d1914), ALOIS PETERS, and William P Smith (d1919). George Morisco (c1842-1919) had a slight variant in that he called himself Man Fly, just as Berenetta Miller was The Fly Girl, and Hervio Nano (1804-47) (a dwarf named Leach) was billed variously as The Gnome Fly, Man Monkey, and What Is It? (see Mons. GOUFFÉ). Hugh Gellini appeared in 1849 at the Bristol as The Celebrated Gnome Fly, which would seem to be a purloining of the recently deceased ‘Signor’ Nano’s billing. Finally let us record Professor Eugene Hermann American Wizard & Ceiling Walker who flourished in the 1850s-60s (see MAGICIANS).
The only double-fly act of our knowledge is Ellen Nichols, professionally k.a. Lolo The Beautiful Lady Fly, and her husband Sylvester The Wondrous Fly Man who in 1877 ‘walked the ceiling, hand-in-hand, amidst breathless excitement ’. The Lady Fly died in 1929, in Grimsby.
This entry is not to be confused with Alma The English Marie Dressler.”

To wander even further from the history of television – the Nazis did awful damage to the German circus, Aryanising it and sending Jewish, Gipsy and physically disabled performers and owners to the gas chambers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under science, strangely compelling, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.