Television Girls

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 45, 17 November 1936, Page 13

Television Girls

By

M. H. HALTON

Loudon, September 9. JOHN LOGIE BAIRD, an obscure Scottish inventor, got together some old bicycle parts, cocoa tins, cheap bull’s-eye lenses, sealing wax and string at a total cost of 7/0, took his collection of junk into a garret in Soho, aud there constructed a television apparatus that actually worked. “I persuaded 50 members of the British Institute of Science to come to my attic and see a demonstration of my invention,” Mr. Baird told me. “For their benefit I televised the face of my office boy. Some of the scientists i present refused to believe the demonstration was genuine. One of them declared that I had a boy hidden iu the box behind the screen 1” , That was in 1926. To-day I went to the Alexandra Palace, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s television centre in North London, and saw a television station four times as powerful as any other in the world preparing to start regular television broadcasts to the entertainment-hungry people of these isles. With the rest of the world lagging far behind (and after a lot of delay), the time has now come in this country when you can sit at your fireside and watch the great J>ig world march past before your eyes. If you’ve got two hundred pounds to buy a set. To-day I saw myself televised —one minute I was walking up the steps of the Alexandra Palace wondering what that GOOft. aerial was for and wishing I knew something about photo-electric eyes, which was what I was going to write about, and the next I was sitting in a studio seeing how I looked as I walked up steps, wondering and wishing and not knowing a television camera was trained upon me.

To-day I sat in a television studio and saw a film of the city of London, and the thing that staggers the imagination is that the film was being taken by a television camera only a split second before I was seeing it on the screen.

To-day I heard Ronnie Greenbautn’s 15-pieee television orchestra playing a hot rumba, and as they played I saw them on the screen before my eyes, though they were miles away. To-day I talked to Elizabeth Cowell and Jasmine Bligh, the first television hostess-announcers in the world. I will hand the mike over to Miss Bligh and Miss Cowell as soon as I've said a few choice words myself. Ladies and gentlemen:

Twenty months ago the British Government appointed a commission to investigate the whole field of television. After eight months (which is fast work for a Government commission), the experts reported that two British companies— Baird Television and Marconi E.M.I.— had both developed television to such an extent that the time had come to put them on the air. The Government at once nationalised television, as it had nationalised radio, set out to build a £200,000 television station, and assured a breathless nation that by Christmas time there would be regular broadcasts of . television programmes. They said* Christmas, 1935, and in an article written at the time I was foolish enough to take them at their word. Apparently they meant Christmas, 1936. Anyway, the first broadcasts were made to-day and I was there to see it.

I saw, there iu the Alexandra Palace, a kind of humming, mechanical, robot-world of the future; room after room full of strange, intricate machines all gleaming with chormium and silver; scenery, musical instruments, giant cameras that didn’t look like cameras, arc lights, lounges, restaurants, theatres, studios; a thing called a mercury arc rectifier that looked like a cavern in hell, all suf-

fused with violet light and making curious moaning noises when switched on or off. I saw the Marconi Emitron, a television camera which is beyond doubt the eighth wonder of the world. This television camera doesn’t photograph, it actually sees. That is, it is direct in its action, and needs no films or other intermediary mechanism. Whatever the camera is trained on is instantaneously reflected on the television screen. The thing looks like a film camera, and Can be carried round on a truck for televising outdoor events; and I repeat, the things it sees are instantaneously reproduced on the screen. So suppose every home in Britain has a televiser. The 8.8. C. will send its Emitron cruising about to see football games and strikes and motor races and visiting film stars. .The very second the camera is turned on a subject or scene, that subject or scene will appear on the screen at Alexandra Palace and two or three seconds later it will be flashed into the homes of all those televiewers who have had the £lOO or £2OO necessary these days to buy a televiser. Radios, you remember, cost about £2OO each in the very first days of radio, and to-day they cost £lO. Ten years from now they’ll be manufacturing televisers in millions and they’ll be down to £lO, too; and there’ll be no peace for a man either at home or abroad.

Elizabeth Cowell and Jasmine Bligh, who are the world’s first television girls and have 100 dresses each for the first time in their lives, told me to-day what it feels like to be the world’s first television girls and have 100 dresses each for the first time in their lives. They were chosen out of thousands of pretty, wide-eyed girls who swarmed around the 8.8. C. trying to be television hostesses in the first public television service ever inaugurated. .. . “Why do you have to have 100 dresses each?” I asked. “Well, said Miss Bligh, “you would get very tired of seeing a television announcer who wore the same clothes every day, wouldn’t you?” Yes, but then I’m likely to get tired of television announcers anyway. ,

Jasmine Bligh, picked from obscurity for television fame, is naturally enough a good-looking girl. So, of course, is Elizabeth Cowell. Both of them are cool, serene and self-confident, not half as excited as I would be if I were one of the world’s first two television hostesses.' They speak beautiful English, and, unlike most 8.8. C. radio announcers, they don’t say ‘‘naice” when they mean “nice’' nor “retained” when they mean “refined” nor “Niffles” when they mean “Whortleberry-Chol-

mondeley.” Now what is the job they have to do in the great days coming on? What, in short, is a television hostess-announcer? . “Suppose,” explained Miss Btign blithely, “that Mr. Bernard Shaw is coming to the studio to make a speech. The televiewers will turn on their sets and see the announcer as he or she describes what is coining. Then Mr. Shaw will enter the room. The announcer will shake hands with him and present him to the public.” This gave me a hint of the revolution which aerial entertainment is about to undergo. In the first place, we have to coin a new word to describe a radiorator who is televised as he orates, and I at once suggest teletalker.” In the second place, the world can now be sure that the speaker is really the person he’s supposed to be, and not some stooge, dupe or understudy. In the third place, crooners who have voices like angels will have to look like angels, too, or they may lose their fan mail. In the fourth place, films will be televised.

“Is this going to ruin movie theatres?” I asked. “Not during the next 10 years,” a 8.8. C. expert advised. “Remember, this tiling is only beginning; and do you think the film companies are going to hand us their films free of charge?” No. I shouldn’t think so, but come back to Jasmine Bligh. Her face and Miss Cowell’s face are now being worked on by make-up experts who wish to find out which combination of powder and paint is most suitable for television. The 8.8. C. has appointed Miss Mary Allen, wife of opera singer Dino Galvani, to be Britain’s television make-up expert. Miss Allen, who has been working on the faces of such actors as Oscar Asche and Sir John Martin Harvey for the last 15 years, knows almost all there is to know about grease paint, but television, she told me, presents new difficulties. For example, the great heat of the television arc lamps, under which the performers must stand, would melt ordinary grease paint right off a girl’s face. “Have vou invented a grease paint that won’t melt?” I asked her. “I have strict instructions not to tell any of my plans,” said Miss Allen. Which is very typical of the 8.8. C. When they’re not broadcasting the world’s dullest programmes they are interfering with the private lives of their employees or having witch-hunts or making new rules to prevent the newspapers learning anything. “You are very unkind,” said a 8.8. C. friend. “You call us dull and old-fashioned when we are just opening the first public television service in the world.”

As two television systems are being used in the British service, Miss Allen has to discover two new types ot makeup. The experiments are being tried out on Miss Cowell, Miss Bligh, and Mr. Leslie Mitchell, the male television host-announcer, and the three of them are having the paintingest time of their lives. “Why is make-up needed at all?” I asked my guide. He replied by showing me an unpainted televised face on a screen, the face of a workman in the grounds outside. There were large dark shadows round his eyes and lie looked as if he had mumps and jaundice.' Then I was shown the televised face of Miss Cowell wearing make-up. The imago was clear as a photograph, and when she smiled we could count her pearly teeth. We saw her take up a telephone and converse with an engineer in the control tower, who could see and hear her by television as she answered his questions. We saw a tele-broadcast of scenes from a Jessie Matthews film, and one of an aeroplane leaving the ground and stunting in the air. In each case the pictures wore as clear, as well-defined and as steady as an ordinary film. Flicker has been completely conquered both in the Baird system and the Marconi. Also, the distance through which television can be broadcast is increasing. Two years ago it was only 10 miles. To-day it is between 25 aud 30 miles, aud reliable experts predict that it will be 100 miles by the end of 1937. But there are still many technical difficulties to be surmounted before television has the range of radio.

Low definition television can already be broadcast hundreds of miles. But low definition images are rough and coarse, with very poor detail, due to the fact that each picture is broken up by the electric eye into only 30 lines each. The high definition system, however, breaks eacli picture into 240 lines and transmits 25 pictures a second instead of 12. But this can only be worked with ultra-short wavelengths, cutting down distance to 25 or 20 miles at the most. This is the greatest remaining problem that television has to face. The Baird company uses the spotlight system for closeups and threequarter length pictures, but most of their work is done by the film method. That is, a film camera photographs the scene in the studio, and this is then transmitted to the television receiver, the whole process taking only 30 seconds. Marconi is using the Emitron television camera already mentioned, which transmits a scene to the

televiewer’s set the moment it is “seen ’ by the “electric eye.” ■ Wandering through the chromium-' plated and practically streamlined I Alexandra Palace, with its studios, orchestras, control rooms, television hostesses and ultra-modern machines, I thought of a day in 1929 when I had gone into a dingy little room in Long Acre, London, to see John Logie Baiid for the first time. "Even in those days,” he told me to-day, “I met with much opposition. Once I was described as a madman and I was searched by police to see if 1 Was carrying a razor on me.” He told me he would never have invented television except for an illness years ago. “It was in 19~0, he said. “I became very ill and lost the little engineering business I had built up after leaving Glasgow university. To recuperate 1 went to Hastings, on the south coast. When I was- a boy I had experimented with selenium cells and dreamed of television, and now, with no money and nothing to do, I began thinking about it again. Once I was so hard up that I had to sell my apparatus for £2 to pay the rent.” . Still unconquered. Baird then got together the collection of cardboard, cocoa tins and other junk mentioned in the first paragraph. That “junk, the world’s first television set, is now in the South Kensington Science Museum, preserved for posterity; many thousands of pounds worth of equipment has been built to transmit scenes from one place to another the moment they occur; and television shares are booming on the British stock market. Television, greatest scientific marvel of the century, has definitely and at last arrived.

Leaving the Alexandra Palace I went to the Radio and Television Exhibition at Olympia, and there, with thousands of others, I saw a programme of television entertainment such as even Baird wouldn’t have dared to dream of a few years ago.

First item: A documentary film called “Cover to Cover,” portraying the development of writing and printing. At the end of the film six famous writers—Somerset Maugham, Julian Huxley, “Sapper,” T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, and A. P. Herbert —came forward in close-up to tell why and how they wrote their books. Second item: Helen McKay sang “Here’s Looking at You,” and as she sang we could see both the accompanist and the piano as well as the singer. Third item: A selection of the latest newsreels.

Fourth: A Grierson documentary film called “Post Haste.” Fifth: Three songs by Helen McKay.

Sixth: A number of excerpts from films, some of them being films not yet released to the theatres. We saw Elizabeth Bergner in “As You Like It”; Jessie Matthews in “It’s Love Again”; Douglas Fairbanks, jun., and Elissa Landi in “The Amateur Gentleman”; Charles Laughton and Gertrude Lawrence in “Rembrandt,” and Paul Robeson in “Show Boat.” The programme was televised from the Alexandra Palace. It came to us at least as plainly as a good amateur film. It was plainly obvious that if television continues to develop at this rate, in three or four years we will be able to see films in our homes just as clearly as we now see them in theatres.

To Sir Noel Ashbridge, the 8.8.C.’s chief television engineer, I put the question: “Would it be an exaggeration to say that if this were 1946 we could sit in our homes and see scenes from the Spanish civil war as they were photographed by news-reel television cameras?” “I think it is probable, though it is not my job to prophesy,” replied Sir Noel. “The demonstration we have just seen at Olympia must be accepted by everyone, scientist or layman. as really remarkable. If we had prophesied this ten years ago we should have been laughed to scorn. Where it will lead we can only guess; yet it seems that the age of miracles has only begun.”

Television sets are on sale to-day, some at less than £lOO. The 8.8. C. announces that before Christmas regular television broadcasts will begin.