Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Conjured up in sound and sight, by the magic rays of light..

I noticed a couple of days ago that it was the sixty-ninth anniversary of the inauguration of the BBC's high-definition television service from Alexandra Palace, which through various name changes means that today's BBC1 is the oldest operating television service in the world. Sixty-nine is not exactly a famous or significant anniversary for anything, but it made me think about how remarkably little is actually known about programming and presentation in the early days of television.

Television was, until the advent of a policy of universal archival, a remarkably ephemeral medium. Unlike a newspaper or a book, once a television programme was broadcast it was effectively gone. Programmes which were shot on film (or, later, videotape) would often linger on for a while, but most of the everyday hubbub of live broadcasting which constituted the early days of television was gone as soon as it had been broadcast. Very few records were kept of what was actually broadcast, with the exception of a few stills, a few sound recordings and the daily paper programme logs. Even many dramas were performed live in the studio.

What this means is that tantalisingly little is known about how early television actually looked and worked. Confusing the situation further is that virtually all of the footage that's out there claiming to be from the earliest days of television is actually more recent reconstruction for documentary purposes, which often pays less attention to historical accuracy than it should. The famous clip of Adele Dixon performing Television at the opening of the service in 1936 is itself a later reconstruction, which has given rise to the myth that her song was the first thing to be broadcast on the BBC Television Service. (Although it was part of the opening programme, there were various speeches broadcast before the variety acts.)

There are other long-standing myths which have long been assumed to be historical facts. For many years, the official version of events surrounding the closedown of television at the outbreak of World War II was that the service was just cut off abruptly in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. This excellent piece of research by the guys at Transdiffusion shows that it wasn't - morning programmes continued as normal, and the service just didn't come back in the afternoon. Another myth - that at the return of the service in 1946 the announcer's first words were "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...". Not true either - they were actually "Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?".

It's only at the start of the 1950s that it becomes possible to say with any certainty how television looked. The growth of television abroad led to an increasing amount of telerecording (recording programmes on film for archival or sale), and with the introduction of video tape at the end of the decade programmes were being routinely originated on VT, although due to the complexity of editing early quad tape they were still usually performed "as live". However, by no means all of these programmes have been kept (as fans of series like Doctor Who are well aware) due to the expense of buying videotape and the storage space needed for a comprehensive archive. Right up until the introduction of colour at the end of the 1960s, television was still treated as an ephemeral medium.

It's an interesting historical lesson. A medium designed for disseminating information is itself so poorly documented in its early days that less than seventy years later it's difficult to say with any certainty what went on. The technical details are all well known, of course - transmitter specifications and camera designs are all well-documented - but the actual nuts and bolts of providing the service, the continuity, the manner in which people behaved on camera, the look of a typical programme - are hazy at best. Given modern television's habit of self-examination and introspection (television producers love making documentaries about television), the fact that the television of the 1930s and 40s was treated as such a throwaway, ephemeral thing is kind of fascinating.

Posted by mpk at November 4, 2005 3:18 PM