BBC to recreate first night of TV, 80 years on.

November 2nd 1936 saw the opening night of the BBC's TV service. Although there had been other broadcasts before, including some low-definition broadcasts made by the BBC themselves, this was the world's first scheduled high definition service.

Next Wednesday BBC4 will be showing "Television's Opening Night - How The Box Was Born", an attempt to recreate the programming of the opening night, including rebuilding the various bits of equipment.

To complicate things further, in 1936 the BBC used two different broadcast systems, EMI-Marconi's 405-line system, and Baird's 240-line one, with plans to alternate between systems on a week-by-week basis. The opening night used both systems, with Baird's going first based on the toss of a coin. The re-creation will attempt to do both.

Having seen a brief trailer for this show, it looks like they're staging the re-creation from the original studios at Alexander Palace in North London, but I may be wrong.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0817s4g

 

The Baird system was somewhat complicated, using two different mechanisms to produce pictures.

Close-up shots of announcers used a flying-spot, generated by a rapidly rotating metal disc, with presenters having to wear heavy make-up to emphasise their features.

Other shoots were achieved via an intermediate-film system. Footage was shot onto 35mm film (cut in half to reduce costs), then passed through potassium cyanide tanks for development before being scanned about 30 seconds after being shot. This meant that the camera could not be panned once a shot was set up. The development equipment was also very noisy, necessitating positioning the camera behind a sound-proofed bay window.

Baird had been carrying out test transmissions from his development complex at Crystal Palace for some time before the BBC went live, and used that location for his development labs. A fire destroyed the Crystal Palace site in December 1936, forcing the BBC to abandon Baird's system soon afterwards due to a lack of spares.

 

Thanks for sharing. I'll check it out. I remember all the coverage for the 50th Anniversary.

 

The contents should be a hoot, expect plum accents and middle class nonsense, I present my evidence



Don't be shocked by the title, it's not what you might think

 

Cool!

 

There was a dramatisation of the beginnings of BBC TV entitled "The Fools On The Hill" which aired around the time of the 50th anniversary.

 

Incidentally the first day's TV listings can be found here, as part of the BBC's Genome project which allows searching of the listings magazine The Radio Times.

BBC Television - 2 November 1936 - BBC Genome »

 

There's a fun anecdote in THE BOX about how they had to stop in mid-broadcast thanks to the bombing. (so, 1940, maybe? I forget the date)

In 1946, they gathered all the same people together to resume broadcasting. They announced, "Well, as we were saying before we were so rudely interrupted. . ." And then started the play right where they left off several years previous.

 

I can hear Churchill and Spitfires flying overhead as I type ("Basil don't mention the war!!"), oh dear sorry, I was overtaken by pride

 

That was cool. Even when Peter Ustinov was young he was the biggest ham in the world.

 

Some of the pre-videotape clips on that BBC video are amazing quality!

I always thought a Kinescope was created by pointing a film camera at a TV screen, which tends to result in low quality videos.

 

That's because they were shot directly on to film for broadcast later.

No actual broadcast footage from the 1936 to 1939 survives, other than the Coronation Kinescope featured in the clip above and a few minutes of unidentified footage captured when the signal was unexpectedly picked up in New York in 1937. The other clips of pre-war television are sourced from demonstration films made for promotional purposes featuring sample output.

There is some surviving footage of the opening night, but that was shot from the side for cinema newsreels.

 

Broadcasting stopped on the September 1st 1939, just before the onset of war, with the service coming to the end in the middle of the day, albeit during a scheduled break in programming. The last scheduled programming to be shown was the Mickey Mouse cartoon "Mickey's Gala Premiere", which was followed by some test patterns. It was only then that transmitter was turned off.

When the television service started up again in 1946, they resumed with the same Mickey Mouse cartoon after about 20 minutes of introductions.

 

The documentary aired on Wednesday evening, and I was frankly underwhelmed.

The project only had six weeks to deliver a replication of the Baird set-up, and they only concentrated on producing the flying-spot scanner used for filming live head shots of continuity announcers. For practicality purposes this scanner was restricted to just 60 lines and 15 frames per second, due to the complicated nature of the original Baird 240 line scanner. That one featured two discs, one spinning at precisely four times the speed of the other, and was encased in a vacuum. However the limited scanner did reveal the problems inherent in the Baird setup.

No attempt was made to replicate the intermediate film system used by Baird for other shots. Safety regulations most likely came into play here, due to the poisonous nature of some of the developing reagents. No mention was made at all of the Farnsworth cameras that the Baird system was also supposed to have used during these early broadcasts.

The rival EMI-Marconi system was also covered, but not emulated. An early TV camera was show working, but this was a somewhat later model to the EMI-Marconi ones which don't appear to have survived. There were also interviews with a couple of people from these early days - one of Baird's engineers who still living, and a woman who appeared early in 1937 as a dancer.

The re-creation wasn't carried out from Alexander Palace (although the original studios were visited, together with the transmitter mast which is still in use), but from a nearby building. This illustrated perfectly the problems with the system, with the announcer sat in a darkened box without being able to read any notes and only being able to be cued by being prodded from outside, made worse by the fact that there was a 56 second delay in the transmission of anything that went by the intermediate film process.

 

Man, and I thought the people on this forum were living in the past...

 

If you stored it in the garage, its likely been destroyed by dampness and would be unplayable. The one thing that destroys videotape is dampness.

 

You must either live somewhere in the desert with zero humidity or else your garage is sealed and climate controlled with a de-humidifier.

 

I'd prefer this:

 

Ahahah! I wish they'd have included a Hector's House type show with him doing an Andy Capp on the kitty and frog. Those good old days.