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 sections may be chosen more than once.
In which section does the
writer mention…
A charge of heart about the
poor quality of programmes? 43.____
A concern about how theatre
and cinema might be affected by TV? 44.____
A difficulty involved for the
makers 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._____
Written evidence of someone’s
dislike of a programme they’d seen? 48.____
A published complaint about
the interest value of a programme? 49._____
A practical problem for
certain people who appared 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 to a new word ‘viewers’. A musical star, Adele Dixon, then sang a song, Television, composed for the occasion, which gave thanks for the mighty mze 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 that it was a ‘ridiculous after’ and that he ‘left early’.
Recently, the BBC4 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.
B. John Logie Baird had first demonstrated television in 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 autumn 1936, in order to sell some of the new television sets at the Radiolympia show. But it was the launch on 2 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 Marsiand 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 a 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: cooker, and gardening, for example. Gander wasn’t alone in finding the content generally mundane and banal. He did concede later 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 series of quick-fire interviews with everyone from a bagpiper in Trafalgar Square to a London cab driver who’d driven someone to far north of Scotland. Picture Page epitomised a key advantage that television had over radio: informality. Radio talk at this time was often scripted, and delivered in an extremely formal tone. On television, the announces 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.
