Free Armchair Nation by Joe Moran

head and said, ‘It cairn’t be, it cairn’tbe.’ Another farmhand sat through a programme composed of literary quotations and said, ‘Those are the items we folks like.’ Boar’s face was ‘alive with mingled pride and enthusiasm as he fondle[d] the television set with all the love which a stockman gives to a new-born calf or a leggy foal’. Television, he said, was the only way of ‘taking part in the exciting life of London’, which he had never seen. Had he lived three centuries ago, the magazine reflected, ‘he would have been burned at the stake as a wizard or a sorcerer in good East Anglian style. But because he lives in the year 1939 he is looked upon for miles around as a fairy godfather who performs miracles.’ 59
    The BBC was starting to flesh out the habits and rituals of this new tribe, the viewers, nearly 900 of whom were already writing regularly to Alexandra Palace about the programmes they had seen. In February and March 1939, the announcers Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell asked viewers to apply to fill in a questionnaire, and over 4,000 – a huge proportion out of about 20,000 set owners – returned them. The survey revealed that viewers loved the announcers; they found extraneous noises of scene-shifting irritating; they thought continental films, operettas and ballets were boring; and they wanted a ‘Children’s Hour’ as on the radio. They mostly disliked items being repeated, although some viewers welcomed this because television was so addictive: ‘We look forward to a repeat of a programme we have already seen, so that we can go out for a walk now and again.’ 60
    One June afternoon in 1939, seventy-five couples, chosen by ballot from the 700 who had applied, attended a ‘television tea party’ at Broadcasting House. Television’s stars – Joan Miller, Jasmine Bligh, Elizabeth Cowell and Leslie Mitchell – wore ‘stop me and ask one’ identity buttons affixed to their coat lapels and handed out smoked salmon sandwiches, cakes and buns. Sitting in the raked, padded seats of the hall, the viewers plied Gerald Cock with questions. ‘Why,’ asked a man at the back, ‘can’t the evening’s programme be given on the screen to save me looking it up in the
Radio Times
?’ This was a matter for the engineers, replied Cock. ‘Why is it that the television orchestra so often drowns the soloists?’ Cramped studio space, came the answer. ‘Why can’t the morning demonstration film be changed?’Because it cost £3,000 to make, Cock said. When he mentioned
Picture Page
, spontaneous applause filled the hall. 61
    â€˜Of course
Picture Page
is our favourite,’ said one woman to Grace Wyndham Goldie, attending for the
Listener
. ‘And the plays. I do like the plays. Except the Insect Play. I didn’t understand what that was all about. And I don’t like the foreign films they put on sometimes. But the rest’s splendid. It’s all so friendly.’ Goldie noted the enormous popularity of the announcers who also doubled up as interviewers and stunt people, having their palms read by chirologists or being rescued from burning buildings in fire displays. As the admiration for the announcers attested, television was already more informal than radio. Radio conversation at this time was often scripted, and Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s director of talks, complained that many speakers read their scripts in a ‘parsonical drone’. On television, by contrast, 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 learn to be natural. Television’s stars, reflected Goldie, would be ‘the people who make direct contact with its small audiences. In other words, they will be the talkers not the actors, the Howard Marshalls not the Clark