Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Page B

unofficial ones: a radius around London with dark and light shading to indicate how likely it was you would get a good picture.
    Like Gander, Barrington had high expectations of the medium, making it clear how unimpressed he was by the decision to televise the formal opening of the new lift at Alexandra Palace. In August 1937 he organised the
Daily Express
Television Exhibition and visitors came from as far as Penzance and Newcastle to see every make of television set. One woman, peering into one, said how wonderful it had seemed when she was young to hear someone’s voice over a telephone: ‘We never thought we’d have anything more marvellous than that, and now here am I, over seventy, seeing someone dancing eight miles away …’ A month later, Barrington organised a
Daily Express
exhibition touring the home counties with a television van showing the daily broadcasts, starting at the Grand Theatre, Woking. He inaugurated the exhibition live on television from Alexandra Palace, thus becoming, he claimed, ‘the first man in the world to declare an exhibition open without bothering to be present’. 48
    The cameras were also there for Neville Chamberlain’s arrival at Heston Airport after his meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in September 1938. ‘No one knew what had happened until, stepping from his aeroplane in front of the television cameras, he told them,’ said
The Times
. ‘This had a quality of history in the making that no other outside broadcast has equalled.’ 49 The return from Munich later that month was also televised: this time the result was known and the mood celebratory. The broadcast, on a Friday afternoon, was not pre-announced so perhaps only a few hundred viewers saw the plane circle in the air, land and taxi up to the waiting group of cabinet ministers, and Chamberlain step out smiling. He aimed his famous, fluttering piece of paper at the newsreel cameramen and press photographers, but these viewers were the first to see it, and they could even make out traces of writing. The commentary, broadcast simultaneously on radio, was by a 25-year-old Richard Dimbleby, who had persuadedBBC News to make him its first ‘News Observer’ and who was single-handedly creating a new sort of journalist: the on-the-spot observer with a microphone in his hand. ‘It’s a real triumph, this arrival,’ Dimbleby said in a fresh, piping voice quite unlike its postwar incarnation. ‘Oh now listen: a very tuneless version of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” … Those of you who are looking as well as listening to this will be able to see this …’

    Television could still not decide if it was a public spectacle or a domestic hobby. On 23 February 1939, Eric Boon fought Arthur Danahar to retain his British lightweight boxing title at the Harringay Arena, and the fight was shown on BBC television at three London cinemas, the first ever pay-per-view televised sporting event. So large was the crowd at the Monseigneur News Theatre in Leicester Square that about a hundred people swept aside the doormen and charged into the auditorium without paying the steep entry fee of one guinea. Police reinforcements arrived to halt the stampede, but the gatecrashers were allowed to remain. The Marble Arch Pavilion and the Tatler News Theatre in Charing Cross Road were also packed, with people standing along each wall and sitting in the aisles. Some were dressed in evening dress and ermine furs, others in cloth caps and mackintoshes.
    The cinema-sized picture was far from perfect. A trainer’s waving towel sent a band of whiteness rushing across the screen, and sometimes the pictures dissolved into irregular patterns, to the sound of whistles and catcalls. ‘Boxers looked like ghosts,’ wrote a reporter at the Marble Arch. ‘You could see the ropes on the further side of the ring show through their bodies; you could see wicked punches