Armchair Nation (8 page)

The cinema-sized picture was far from perfect. A trainer's waving towel sent a band of whiteness rushing across the screen, and sometimes the pictures dissolved into irregular patterns, to the sound of whistles and catcalls. ‘Boxers looked like ghosts,' wrote a reporter at the Marble Arch. ‘You could see the ropes on the further side of the ring show through their bodies; you could see wicked punches that sailed straight through shadowy white figures. It was like moving spirit pictures. But if you went to see a fight, you forgot that.'
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The imperfections were indeed soon forgotten, as shouts and applause in the cinemas merged with the sounds from the arena. The audience could make out Danahar's textbook punch, the straight left
delivered standing side on, while the smaller Boon stood flatfooted, ducking and weaving to get inside his opponent's longer reach. Both men floored each other several times until, in the fourteenth round, Danahar rose weakly and the referee declared Boon, his face splashed with blood and one eye completely closed, the winner. A nineteen-and twenty-year-old had pummelled each other into near oblivion, live on television. People in Boon's home town of Chatteris in Cambridgeshire had asked the police if they could watch the TV set in the station but they refused, in case it interfered with police work. But as soon as the referee stopped the fight, the local inspector sent up a firework to let people in the Fens know their man had won. Boon's mother watched at a friend's house in the town, turning her face away from the screen and wincing whenever her son was hit.

Many thought the Boon–Danahar broadcast was the future of television: large crowds congregating in cinemas and other public places to watch live sport and spectacle. But it was really Mrs Boon, watching in an ordinary living room, who foretold the future. As Alan Hunter wrote in the
Radio Times
, ‘When on my home television set I see Jasmine Bligh announcing the programme, she seems to be speaking to me, not to thousands of others, as in a cinema. An aspect of intimacy, if you like. But one that can be utterly destroyed with even a small crowd in a demonstration room.'
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These home viewers were forging a strong, intimate relationship with the performers. The Alexandra Palace offices filled up daily with appreciative letters and cards. When the palace was shrouded in London fog, as happened often, and most dramatically on Christmas night 1937, viewers with cars rang to ask if they could drive the artistes back to their homes. When viewers called after a programme, the performers would speak to them on phones in the corridors outside the studio. The comedian Cyril Fletcher, who appeared regularly on pre-war television, got to know certain callers well. Just before Christmas 1938, Gerald Cock sat at his desk on camera and invited viewers to ring him up and ask questions. As they phoned from as far away as Birmingham and Margate, Cock feigned panic to his off-camera secretary, whispering out of the side of his mouth, ‘Phew! I got over
that fence.' Then to wind things up, just before a woman called to say that she thought television ‘marvellous', the presenter of radio's
Children's Hour
, Uncle Mac, rang up to wish Cock a happy Christmas.
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In other ways, the audience seemed furtive and unreal, and Alexandra Palace residents had to find more creative ways to speculate about them. A young BBC producer, Royston Morley, kept a lookout, while driving his car, for television aerials on chimney tops, which he saw on average about every five minutes. On the palace esplanade, the performers looked out on to the redbrick avenues of Stroud Green, Finsbury Park and Hornsey, middle-class real estate and native soil of the television aerial. In the distance, they could make out the Kent and Surrey Downs, which blocked the TV signal's journey further south. Seventeen-year-old Dinah Sheridan, after performing in the play
Gallows Glorious
, stood on the palace steps looking at the shimmering lights of London and wondered ‘how many of those houses had a TV set and had seen what we had just done. Probably less than a hundred.'
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An engineer wrote in
Wireless World
that unsentimental technicians like himself, who were ‘steeled to derive no more interest or emotion from the most sublime sound than from a test oscillation', were now captivated by the television programmes. On the televising of the departure of the king and queen for Canada in May 1939, as they drove through waving crowds from Buckingham Palace to Waterloo Station, he noted that he had seen viewers cheering as if they were standing on the kerb while their majesties passed by, something that never happened in a cinema during the newsreels. Even the slow pace of television compared to the newsreels was an advantage, for you didn't feel ‘battered and jerked around the high-spots of the week's action throughout the world in five breathless minutes like a thousand horse-power butterfly'. When an ordinary film was televised you immediately noticed the difference, for the commentator had
that ‘slightly breathless declamatory style, as if he is afraid of being thrown out before he has said all he wants to'. On television, speakers calmly addressed the individual viewer, and the sound of frying fat in a cookery demonstration was so convincing that ‘one instinctively draws one's legs in to keep them out of range of grease spots'. Nor was the small screen a problem. If you were close enough it was the same size as a cinema screen viewed from the best seats, and ‘a penny held at arm's length is in effect larger than the sun'.
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The domestic audience was middle-class, though not exclusively so: Bruce Forsyth's garage-mechanic father, for example, had bought a television for their house in the solidly working-class area of Edmonton in north London. The social makeup of most viewers probably accounted for the evening programme not starting until 9 p.m. The later-dining middle classes would finish eating about fifteen minutes beforehand, gather in the sitting room with coffee and cigarettes, and wait for the valves of the set to warm up and the picture to appear, with the same air of expectancy they might feel in the theatre. As a phenomenon yet to spread to the masses, television does not seem to have been an object of intellectual disdain. Virginia Woolf wrote to her nephew Julian Bell, teaching in China: ‘Oh dear how I wish television were now installed and I could switch on and see you.'
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As a loyal patron of Selfridge's, Woolf is likely to have seen television there. Her friend, Marcel Boulestin, an expat Frenchman who owned a Covent Garden restaurant which sought to wean the British away from stuffy haute cuisine, was the first television chef. Since all his dishes had to be prepared in fifteen minutes, one of his earliest broadcasts introduced British viewers to the kebab.

Other members of Woolf's social set certainly saw television. ‘V. and I go round to the Beales' where there is a Television Set lent by a local radio-merchant,' wrote the National Labour MP and writer, Harold Nicolson, in his diary on 4 February 1939, after visiting a neighbouring farmer at Sissinghurst in Kent. ‘We see a Mickey Mouse, a play and a Gaumont British film. I had always been told that the television could not be received above 25 miles from Alexandra Palace. But the reception was every bit as good as at Selfridge's. Compared
with a film, it is a bleary, flickering, dim, unfocused, interruptible thing, the size of a quarto sheet of paper such as this on which I am typing. But as an invention it is tremendous and may alter the whole basis of democracy.'
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Nicolson's wife, Vita Sackville-West, busy creating her celebrated garden at Sissinghurst, might have been the BBC's first television gardener. The BBC had broadcast gardening talks on the radio from within a few months of its formation in 1922 and Sackville-West was a frequent speaker. She was considered for the role of radio gardener but the job went to an unknown county council horticultural adviser called Mr Middleton. In 1936, he also became the BBC's first television gardener, working in a purpose-built plot in Alexandra Park, with cable trailed across the road from the palace. He became such a well-known figure that the comic actor, Nelson Keys, impersonated him on television. Keys appeared in a mildewed hat and mangy coat, carrying a dead cat, and making lugubrious pronouncements like ‘the thistles are doing nicely today' and ‘add a little fish manure at the earliest opportunity'. The grassy slopes of the park had become an outdoor studio not just for gardening but for sheepdog trials, archery and golf. For one night-time broadcast, they reconstructed the Zeebrugge Raid of 1918 with model boats on the nearby lake.

The historian Ross McKibbin describes British television before the war as ‘a cloud no bigger than a man's hand'. But to its contemporary viewers, it must have seemed more substantial than this. There were now some regular programmes, placemarks in the schedules. Sunday afternoons were for ‘Television Surveys': outside broadcasts from the International Telephone Exchange at Faraday Buildings or from Watford railway junction to show how locomotives were overhauled and track was relaid. Once a month on Wednesdays the viewer went ‘Down on the Farm' to see wheat rolling or lambing at Bull Cross Farm which, to keep out the curious hordes, was described as ‘somewhere in the Home Counties'. ‘Does sheep dipping make good television entertainment?', the
Listener
's new television critic, Grace Wyndham Goldie, opened her review of this programme, concluding it with an affirmative.
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Hit West End shows like
Magyar Melody, The
Desert Song
and
Me and My Girl
were shown live from the theatre, including shots of the crowds in the foyer and the stars in their dressing rooms. Other programmes drew on the sense of viewers as an ad hoc community. A common form of entertainment was the ‘Bee', a participatory quiz show in which viewers were invited to spell difficult words or whistle ‘Softly awakes my heart' from beginning to end.

The
Radio Times
presented television as a domestic entertainment but a social one, and urged viewers to hold television parties for their non-viewing friends. The magazine tried to draw on the growing sense of camaraderie among this group of pioneers. ‘A week or two ago I was introduced to a neighbour of mine,' wrote the regular television columnist, ‘the Scanner'. ‘We talked sweet nothings until I said as a brother-viewer I was glad to see his roof was graced with a television aerial. A reaction of delight was immediate; it was like the meeting of two anglers.' After Edgar Charloe from Acton wrote to suggest founding a society of viewers, the Scanner reflected that ‘there must be hundreds of viewers in that thickly populated suburb who feel the same way as he does'. The
Radio Times
liked to identify celebrities with televisions, such as the cartoonist David Low, the dance band leader Henry Hall and the comedian Will Hay. It awarded the title of oldest viewer to 91-year-old Mr E. C. Rolls of Walton-on-Thames, who had dim memories of the Crimean War and who, after seeing Noel Coward's
Hay Fever
on Christmas night 1938, was hooked.
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The magazine also unearthed a farmhand from Long Melford, Suffolk, called George Thomas Boar. After reading in the
Radio Times
that television was on its way, he had saved up £60, which was doubled by a small legacy, and in the autumn of 1937 had paid 120 guineas for a TV set, even though he lived fifty miles from Muswell Hill. Subject to a formal application, he allowed other villagers to come to his cottage and see the programmes for free. About a thousand people, including his farmer-boss, had come to watch in his two-room cottage, giving Long Melford easily the highest proportion of viewers in the country. After she had seen Boar's television, an 87-year-old woman shook her head and said, ‘It cairn't be, it cairn't
be.' Another farmhand sat through a programme composed of literary quotations and said, ‘Those are the items we folks like.' Boar's face was ‘alive with mingled pride and enthusiasm as he fondle[d] the television set with all the love which a stockman gives to a new-born calf or a leggy foal'. Television, he said, was the only way of ‘taking part in the exciting life of London', which he had never seen. Had he lived three centuries ago, the magazine reflected, ‘he would have been burned at the stake as a wizard or a sorcerer in good East Anglian style. But because he lives in the year 1939 he is looked upon for miles around as a fairy godfather who performs miracles.'
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The BBC was starting to flesh out the habits and rituals of this new tribe, the viewers, nearly 900 of whom were already writing regularly to Alexandra Palace about the programmes they had seen. In February and March 1939, the announcers Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell asked viewers to apply to fill in a questionnaire, and over 4,000 – a huge proportion out of about 20,000 set owners – returned them. The survey revealed that viewers loved the announcers; they found extraneous noises of scene-shifting irritating; they thought continental films, operettas and ballets were boring; and they wanted a ‘Children's Hour' as on the radio. They mostly disliked items being repeated, although some viewers welcomed this because television was so addictive: ‘We look forward to a repeat of a programme we have already seen, so that we can go out for a walk now and again.'
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