First TV star was just a dummy

Press, 19 August 1982, Page 19

First TV star was just a dummy

From

CHARLES FRASER

in London

A cramped basement room in the bowels of London's Broadcasting House made possible the TV programmes screened today. It was there that the world's first television studio was opened just 50 years ago oh August 22. Studio BB had originally been intended for radio music broadcasts. Now it was filled with the latest experimental Baird TV cameras and receivers — a move dismissed by the 8.8.C.'s director-general. Lord Rejth, as “a grave mistake.”

The plan was to train producers, performers and cameramen in what was a totally new medium, but the first face in front of the 8.8. C. cameras was not even human.

“Television Tilly” was a shop-window dummy used to focus cameras, and it was dressed up in multi-coloured clothes to see which colours photographed best in black and white.

The first public transmission at Radiolympia in London. full of flickers and without sound, flashed the liner Queen Mary on to TV screens within four hours of her docking at Southampton in 1936. A match between Arsenal and Everton also, made history — as the first televised football match.

Strangely, the • first TV transmissions seemed to

leave the public cold. Marsland Gander, Britain's first TV critic, described them as “even more boring than a current political broadcast," and sales of TV sets were far below the most pessimistic expectations. By the New Year after that first transmission, only 400 had left the shops. Even by the end of 1935, the figure had barely reached 2000.

Desperate manufacturers slashed prices. Sets plunged from the equivalent of $235 to $l4O. Even in 1938 it was possible to pick up a 10-inch (25cm) set (monochrome, of course) for around $54. It was estimated that at the outbreak of war in September, 1939, when the TV service was temporarily closed, there were only about 16,000 sets in the entire country. Programmes ran at first only two hours a day, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 9 to 10 in the evening.

The 8.8. C. was starved of funds by a frankly sceptical management — only $425,000 was made available for two years of programming. Soon it was proudly announced that pictures could be received up to 110 km away and that it was even possible to pick up a signal

in the Channel Islands — although admittedly only under freak weather conditions.

A highlight of viewing schedules was excerpts from current West End plays, with cameras actually in the theatre. Indeed, the 8.8.C.’s fees were so low that few artists were prepared to make the journey to Alexandra Palace in north London from where programmes were transmitted. Viewers, for all the frequent breakdowns and flickering images, got the best of the bargain. There was no separate licence fee for TV, and the radio licence was a modest $l.lB.

Some things, however, have not changed much in the past half-century. When, in the 19705, women newsreaders were introduced on 8.8. C. TV, the concept was as much news as back in. the summer of 1936 when two girls appeared on TV regularly for the. first time. Demure Jasmine Bligh had impeccable credentials, daughter of the Hon. Mrs Noel Bligh and a niece of Earl Darnley, and Elizabeth Cowell came from Cambridge and was living in Chelsea.

A journalist wrote at the time: “Miss Bligh is tall,

statuesque, really beautiful in the dignified " Edwardian manner. Miss Cowell is slight, quick, with a lively face which one could call “chic.” “One has blue eyes, the other brown. Both have pleasant voices, easy manners and are discreetly dressed in black and white.”

By then, the search was on for a male heart-throb. Six hundred men applied for the TV announcing job which was eventually given to Leslie Mitchell, already on the staff of the 8.8. C. and who became famous as the voice on wartime cinema newsreels. Lord Reith continued to grumble that TV had no future, but his criticism became somewhat muted when in January 1935 a government White Paper stated that “a general television service will be reached only step by step, but the steps will be as frequent as possible and in our opinion the first step should be taken now.”

But viewers, even after the war, remained largely indifferent. There was some interest in 1955, when Independent Television swept in as a rival to the 8.8. C. but within a year, viewing figures had slumped, advertisers drifted away and there were rumours of company bankruptcies. Today, however, the position is very different: advertisers spend an estimated $945 million a year on British commercial TV. Deliveries of colour sets are estimated to be 1,300,000 per year, with imports of small-screen monochrome sets at record level. Those 1932 prophets of doom certainly seem to have got it wrong in predicting little future for the gadget which John Logie Baird had evolved from a tea chest, darning needles, bicycle parts, and the lens from a chain-store torch. Bernard Shaw, after watching one of his playlets in the pioneering days, commented: "The screen is small, but you get used to it.” It was a masterpiece of understatement which time has proved to be 100 per cent correct. Features International.