The first days of television

 Part 7.- You are going to read an article about the first days of television. For questions 43-52, choose from the sections (A-E). The section may be chose more than once.

In which section does the writer mention…

a change of heart about the poor quality of programmes? 43.-____

a concern about how the theatre and cinema might be affected by TV? 44.-_____

a diificulty involved for the markers of one programme? 45.-___

the idea that a break between programmes could be good for the listener? 46.-____

an experimental version of TV which predated the official beginning? 47.-____

wtitten evidence of someone’s dislike of a programma they’d seen? 48.-____

a published complaint about the interest value of a programme? 49.-____

a practical problem for certain people who appeared on TV? 50.-____

a programme that featured ordinary people doing unusual things? 51.-____

TV being presented as something mysterious and unexplainable? 52.-____

 

The first days of television

A.- At 3pm on 2 November 1936, BBC television officially began. Mr RC Norman, the BBC chairman, gave a speech that introduced those watching a new word: ‘viewers’. A musical start, Adele Dixon, then sang a song, ‘Television, to you’, composed for the occasion, which gave thanks for the ‘mighty maze of mystic, magic rays’ that ‘bring a new wonder to you.’ The BBC’s director-general, John Reith, attended that evening’s broadcast, a single programme called Television Comes to London. In his diary he wrote that is was a ‘ridiculous affair’ and that he ‘left early’.

 

Recently, the BBCA channel remembered the occasion in a programme called Television’s Opening Night: How the Box Was Born. The first broadcast was recreated using the original technology. This was quite a challenge as no recording exists, of course – all television then was live and died on the air as it was broadcast.

 

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B.- John Logie Baird had first demonstrated television 1925, but the BBC was lukewarm about his invention. The BBC yearbook for 1930 reflected the official view. ‘If this power is ever brought to mechanical perfection,’ it wrote of television, ‘there is little reason… that anyone but a few should go in person to any place of entertainment again.’ The BBC had trialled the new television service it was developing for two weeks in autum 1936, in order to sell some of the new television sets at the Radiolympia show. But it was the launch on 9 November that gave us television that we would recognise today: broadcast two hours a day, at 3pm and 9pm, except Sundays.

 

C.- As time went on many more programmes were developed. L Marsland Gander, one of the first television critics, wrote in his newspaper: ‘I find that next Saturday a Mr JT Baily is to demonstrate on the television screen how to repair a broken window… Probably at some future time, when we have television

 

All day long, it will be legitimate to cater for minority of potential window repairers.  Out of two hours, however, the allocation of 30 minutes to such a subject seems disproportionate.’ From the start, television had more of what we’d now call lifestyle programmes than radio cookery, and gardening, for example, Gander wasn’t alone in finding the content generally mundane and banal. He did concede later that the first edition of Picture Page, on that opening night of 2 November, had filled him ‘with an enthusiasm for a new artform that has never waned’.

D.- On Picture Page there was a series of quick-fire interviews with everyone from a bagpiper in Trafalgar Square to a London cab driver who’d driven someone to the far north of Scotland, Picture Page epitomised a key advantage that felevision had over radio: informality. Radio talk at this time was often scripted, and delivered in an extremely formal tone. On television, the announcers could not read from a script if they wanted to look at the viewer, and could not see much in the glare of the lights anyway, so they had to speak more spontaneously and learn to sound natural.

 

E.- Even so, Reith never changed his position, and said later that the arrival of television influenced his decision to leave the BBC in 1938. On his last day, the corporation presented him a rather tactless leaving present a television set. He barely looked at it. Were Reith alive today, what would he make of BBC television now? Mostly he would be appalled by the sheer abundance of it, the way it fills every hour of the day. This was a man, after all, who decreed that there be a few minutes’ silence in between radio programmes to allow people to switch off.