RADIO RECORD

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 April 1937, Page 9

RADIO RECORD

NOTES FOR LISTENERS-IN

(By

“Reception”)

ART OF TELEVISION PERSONAL EXPERIENCE Being televised is rather like being operated on. Very painless and comfortable, ot‘ course, but something of the hospital atmosphere creeps into it somewhere —bright lights, subdued voices, rubber-floored corridors, clean sheets draped round you for make-up, and a great many people solicitously asking you how you feel when it is all over. . . .

I went on the air (face and voice together) by three separate methods from the 8.8. C. tower of the Alexandra Palace, writes Margaret Laue in the “Daily Mail.”

Spotlight, which shuts you up in a dark room and leaves you to yourself for a nerve-racking five minutes; electron camera, which operates in the same way, as far as the victim is concerned as a film camera; and, most dismaying of all, intermediate film, which allows you to dash through into the next room as soon as you have finished and see and hear yourself “coming over” 60 seconds later in a television cabinet! In a few months’ time, I suppose, everybody will be as familiar with the processes of television as they are with those of a broadcasting studio; but to me it had something of the feeling of a new and extremely complicated game in which one has to learn the rules as one goes along, and in which mistakes are fatal.

Cough, sneeze or hiccup while broadcasting, and the accident is admittedly overheard by several mission listeners; but with television (shocking thought!) it is observed as well. Your face, as well as your voice, must be on its best behaviour.

To begin at the beginning: you climb up a great many flights of stairs in one of the towers of the Alexandra Palace (television./ is too new to have its lifts working yet), walk along immeasurable distances of sound-proof corridor, and are handed over to a sympathetic, nurse-like young woman in a white overall, who operates in a brightly-lit compartment marked “Artists’ Make-up Room.”

YELLOW AND BLUE This young woman, who holds the fate of your televised face in the hollow of her hand, is Miss Mary Allen, and it is her job to paint your face yellow and your lips blue for the spotlight. She set me down under bright lights wrapped me in clean sheets up to the chin, bound up my hair under a bandage, and got to work with her surprising colour box. A different make-up is necessary for each of the three methods of television, and it is Miss Allen’s business to know all about the effects of different colours “on the air,” and to plaster your face accordingly. Here is a plan of the colour schemes to which she treated me:—Spotlight, yellowish face, bright sky-blue lips and eyelids; electron camera, light ochre face, brown lips, eyelids, and eyebrows; intermediate film, same makeup as for an ordinary film camera — that is, thick yellowish foundation, grey eye-shadow, red lips. Equipped, then, with your blue and yellow face, rather after the fashion of a mandrill, you are introduced through a light-proof door and a thick curtain into the almost complete darkness of the spotlight room. Miss Jasmine Bligh, one of the 8.8.C.’s television announcers, . who goes through this performance about five times a day, and is as well accustomed to seeing her face in its blue-and-yellow disguise as ,in its more natural colouring, steered me expertly over cables and wires and on to a small platform, facing a watchful, dazzling beam of quivering light. This beam, to which-one looks as a broadcaster to the microphone, is one’s sole audience in the Spotlight. You talk to it, confidently feeling reassured and private in the dark. This is the system used for announcements, for intimate talks, and all close-up work. There is a telephone standing at your elbow in the dark, and before yen start a technician in the receiving room, watching the variations of your face in his receiving set, rings you up and moves you about until the image is to his liking.

“About three inches forward. . .. that’s better. I’urn a fraction sideways, like you were before. No, that’s too far . . . that’s it! Voice o.k. Don’t move out. of the centre, it distorts you. . . ”

DIRECT TELEVISION Ou the screen of his set, your image, telephone in hand, obediently moves about and plies him with anxious questions. A lighted sign flashes on. near the ceiling. “Sound on.” You wait a second, until it is followed by another —“Sight on." Race and voice are on the air now. You do your worst.

Then, quickly back to Mary Allen. wh<. whisks the hideous blue and yellow off your face and replaces it with an almost equally hideous make-up of yellow and brown. You arc hustled into what might be a film studio, complete with arc lights and microphones. This nielht-d. with its big floor ami complicated lighting, is used for ballel. plays, and most of the entertainment numbers.

It is the Electron Camera, giving “direct television"—'tlml is. as you speak and move, so your speech and movement are reproduced in the rereiving set. With the third, the Intermediate i-’ilni system, the whole tiling becomes a sort of general post. With your ordinary film make-up on. you come back into the big studio, but this time the cameras and camera-men are bidden behind an ettorim.tis glass window, and they film you through it. As soon as you have tinishbd your turn you run headlong into an adjoining room, and 60 seconds inter watch the whole tiling happen all over again in a receiving set. The secret of this apparent piece of magic, lies in the fact that 5011 are not dire<d 1;. !•devised at all. you filmed. an for the “m"'" " -"id »!>1 ;-i r<- r [tile mm leoni’e's firm 'he lilm i.i developed. li.-.ed, and i.< I ■ -med. ii is pbe film of yourself, not yourself direct 1 which you see.

HIGHBROW BOGY ENGLISH POET’S VIEWS Who and what is “the highbrow”? asks Humber Wolfe, distinguished j English poet, playwright, and expel t lon international labour questions, in lan article in the London ‘Radio I Times.’ He is indeed as difficult (and [dangerous) to locate as the Snark. None can describe his characteristics, Ihis appearance, or his habitat. Or [rather his description varies according [to’ the prejudices of the reporter a I phenomenon equally noticeable in the lease of war correspondents. Mr. Berinard Shaw, for example, is, or was, a i highbrow in Wigan. He is the worst [type of low-brow among the jeiI seyed epicenes who control the emojtions of the momentary equivalent of I Bloomsbury. John Galsworthy is still la highbrow, with followers of the iQuorn. To the young lions of the Left [he is a jar of pot-pourri. In a word, .“highbrow” is a noun which describes 'what one doesn’t like or understand, and often what one both dislikes and i misunderstands.

Need the wireless cringe to this bogy, which, like stage-mountains, is [inaccessible because it isn’t there? Could it not, perhaps, rub its eyes, as Aladdin rubbed the lamp, and discover a terrifying but obedient genie? Might not the genie say something in : sepulchral Arabian tones, which, being translated, means in two three-letter 'words, “Old Vic?” If it is true that i that temple of the dramatic art plays i night after night to full house 0 in I competition with the succulent horrors associated with such names as Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich, might not the wireless take heart and remember the old Latin tag, “Magna est veritas et praevalebit?” Truth is great, and will prevail! Need the wireless sneak into the corridors of The Brontosaurus and learn from its dolichocephalic controllers that drama has only one leg to stand on—and that must be shapely and not unduly reticent? Could it not pluck up heart and say, “But if they will fill the house for ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ must substitute Shirley Temple for the Montagues and Capulets?” Shall we not dare to -trust the people and believe that as long as we speak of things undying with the cold authority of art, Death’s pale flag is not advanced there?

It is not impossible, it is not even improbable. The truth is that the people are always in the long run wiser and greater than their leaders. The voice of the people may not be the voice of God, but it is often its echo. Nor can you fool all of them all the time. Some day,’ somehow, the revolution comes. The hungry sheep have looked up and are not fed. By a miracle as frequently repeated as it is unexpected, the sheep are transformed into lions and devour those that starved them.

. The wireless that is given the keys of tho kingdom of the ears need not starve them either in drama or in poetry. There is a story told of an old woman who was being canvassed for h r vote. She listened sullenly to those, who besought her suffrage. Finally one of her aggressors said to her. “But don’t you ever listen to what the speakers say?” “Aye,” she said, “I listens and I gives a good laugh.” The wireless has no need to excite cither this popular mistrust or its laughter. In essence great drama and great poetry can and should be addressed to the ear. Need we all be spiritual snobs and Pharisees? Can we not believe that the man in the street is just as able to see the sky as the manin the smoke, room of a golf club or in a Chelsea studio? Indeed, since his eyes are not distraught with fumes might, not he see it clearer and more steadily? The wireless is Columbus. America waits across the world. Is it to be a New World, or only an Old World that mutters in its sleep? “’E pur s muove’ is a lie?” Is the wireless on the side of Galileo? Those who are not for progress and light are against it.

NO BRIBES FOR -ANNOUNCERS A Spanish general, broadcasting from Seville, recently declared that 8.8. C. announcers were bribed, and for that reason Broadcasting House continued to report Government successes in Spain. Needless to say, the 8.8. C. announcers, on every occasion without exception, read exactly the news bulletins handed to them without comment. These are prepared from news supplied by well-known and reputable agencies. There has been much favourable coininenl. in the overseas Press on their impartiality and completeness. On the question of “bribery,” Mr. Shewen, the senior Empire announcer, who has been 13 years with the 8.8. C., states that never on any occasion either in tho Home or Empire services has there been any attempt to bribe him or any other announcer. One one occasion a festive individual was willing to wager Mr. Shewen live shillings that he would not say “Good evening, everybody, and Aunt Maria.” The wager was not accepted. Air. Stuart Hibberd, the senior announcer, states that no offer has ever come h~s way. ’The nearest approach was a box of haddocks sent to him by a fisherman, who heard a gale warning broadcast and brought his nets in. whereas a rival firm who did not hear it lost all their tackle.