Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Page A

improvement upon stage coaches; mechanised flight, on ballooning; but television is an improvement on nothing. It is something new under the sun.’ 44
    The most eagerly awaited programmes were outside broadcasts, particularly sport. The BBC was there on Monday 21 June 1937 for the first day at Wimbledon, although the link with Alexandra Palace was difficult because of the hilly terrain in between. To take advantage of the rising ground towards Wimbledon Common, the television signal was sent by cable across the car park to Barker’s sports ground, 700 feet from Centre Court – an area now better known as Henman Hill, where fans gather to watch the fate of gallant British losers on a giant TV screen – and transmitted from an aerial on top of the turntable ladder of a London fire engine. Hornsey Central Hospital near Alexandra Palace was right in its way, but the hospital secretary agreed to suspend all diathermy activities (heating internal organs by electric current) while Wimbledon was on so as not to ruin the reception.
    As viewers joined the tennis, Bunny Austin, the great almost-champion of Wimbledon and the last of the gentleman amateurs, was stuttering to a win against G. L. Rogers. The court was too big for the screen and the grass-stained ball could barely be distinguished from the grass, but critics stressed the positives. ‘It has seldom beenpossible to watch the progress of the ball itself,’ conceded one forgiving reviewer. ‘But the strokes and the movements about the court have all been so clearly visible that the absence of the ball has hardly seemed to trouble the viewer after his eyes and his spectator’s reactions have become accustomed in a minute or so to the strangeness of it all.’ 45
    On 11 November 1937, the television cameras were at the Cenotaph for a memorable two minutes’ silence. Shortly after the last chime of Big Ben had died down, a man broke through the crowd and ran into the road, screaming ‘All this hypocrisy!’ and something else that sounded like ‘Preparing for war!’ Half a dozen policemen gave chase and, just yards from the prime minister, clambered on top of him and muffled his cries. The man turned out to be Stanley Storey, an ex-serviceman who had escaped from a mental asylum. The TV picture was in long shot so viewers just heard ‘hypocrisy!’ and saw the crowd swaying slightly, before it settled back into a vast, uniform mass, with just the background noise of distant traffic, birdsong and shuffling feet. This was why the BBC had lobbied hard in the 1920s to broadcast the silence on radio. It knew that simply shutting down the airwaves for two minutes would not have the same impact as this resonant near-silence. The effect, strangely, was magnified when you could see it. ‘The television cameras make a naturally impressive scene even more impressive,’ concluded the
Radio Times
. ‘Watching the Silence, broken by the rustle of falling leaves in Whitehall, is an unforgettable experience.’ 46
    Cyril Carr Dalmaine, viewing the silence in a room above Dorking High Street, had more technical concerns. He felt he was being offered a foretaste of what television would be like when the engineers had sorted out the problem of interference. ‘As cars, buses, lorries outside switched off their engines and came to rest, so did the crackling fade from the sound reception and the spots from the viewing screen, rather as if some unseen smudge had been wiped off a palette,’ he wrote. ‘For those two minutes the picture came to us clean, clear and steady – like a photograph.’ 47 Dalmaine was the real name of Jonah Barrington, the radio critic for the
Daily Express
, and both he andhis newspaper were proselytisers for television. The
Express
had sold some of the first DIY television kits in the early 1930s and, at a time when the BBC was not listing an official reception map, issued its own