Armchair Nation by Joe Moran

experiments with television suggest that it can fill a great gap in their lives.’ 41
    Many shops and hotels had also installed television. The
Radio Times
reported in March 1937 that in the television rooms of the big department stores ‘there are still large crowds every day, though the numbers have dropped since the beginning of the year, when special arrangements had to be made to control the crowds’. Bernard Buckham in the
Daily Mirror
had heard about ‘a poor couple who go to a London store every day and watch the programme through. It is certainly a cheap amusement.’ In the summer of 1937, Michael Barry, the young artistic producer of the Croydon Repertory Theatre, saw television at Kennards department store on the high street, where the afternoon broadcast was shown in the sports section on the first floor. ‘I stood behind a couple of dozen spectators crowded into a hessian booth and strained to watch, beyond their heads, midget dancersjiggling about on a small screen,’ Barry wrote half a century later. ‘It was, I thought, quite the silliest thing I had seen.’ 42

    On the morning of 3 May 1937, a mobile television van pulled up beside the grass at Apsley Gate on Hyde Park Corner. The BBC cameraman pointed his equipment at the passing crowds, Monday’s late-running commuters and sundry pedestrians. Alexandra Palace engineers stared at their sets. Through a slight blur, they saw the trees waving in the breeze and the Household Cavalry riding on Rotten Row. Passing cars came sharply into focus with even the registration numbers readable. Passers-by gazed confusedly into the camera. A young woman, oblivious to viewers, put on her lipstick. For two hours the engineers tested on a closed circuit. Then at 12.45 p.m. they decided to televise Hyde Park to whoever happened to be looking in, ringing up their wives in their suburban homes and telling them to turn on the set. Those who switched on saw a bright sunny day in the park. A man lit a cigar and smoked it and a little girl, in the middle of a riding lesson, sat awkwardly in the saddle. The act of distant looking seemed to transform this routine scene, showing viewers the unnoticed patterns and unstaged reality of daily life – the television camera as camera obscura again.
    This strangely gripping programme was just a test for the coronation broadcast nine days later. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, refused his request to allow cameras into Westminster Abbey, the BBC’s director of television, Gerald Cock, found the one place in London along the procession where you could get a close-up without interruption: the central plinth of Apsley Gate. While the Post Office laid eight miles of television cable from Alexandra Palace, Cock went to Buckingham Palace and asked King George VI if he would smile into the camera when his carriage passed. The king agreed and wrote on a slip of paper that he kept inside the coach, ‘Look right outside the window at Hyde Park Corner and smile.’ 43 The coronation crowds were fixated on how close they would get to the new king and queen and how much they would be able to see of them. The must-have item along the processional route was a periscope. When the king smiled directly at viewers, it offered them the proximity and sensation of real life that the crowds craved.
    At a Southgate cinema, about a hundred people saw it on one small television, and stood up and cheered at the end. A similar crowd gathered round a set in a marquee at Ranelagh polo ground. Manufacturers’ and retailers’ estimates that over 50,000 people saw the procession ‘astonished the most hopeful’, although the BBC guessed more cautiously at 10,000. A small army of viewers scattered from Ipswich to Brighton had seen, said the corporation, ‘a phenomenon which would have been hailed in any other age either as a miracle or as a piece of witchcraft … Trains were an