OTD in early British television: 22 January 1938
John Wyver writes: one part of Saturday primetime (not that there was such a concept yet) on 22 January 1938 was given over to a 13-minute Table Tennis Demonstration by the great Hungarian-British champion Victor Barna and four members of the England table tennis team, among them a sole woman, Margaret Osborne. This was a second presentation of a transmission that had also run earlier in the week, and of one of these broadcasts we have a richly detailed description in an anonymous Listener column (26 January 1938; from where the image above comes).
On the evidence of these broadcasts, the writer was convinced that
the game of table tennis is admirably suited to the present needs of television. We could see the quickest movement of the player’s hand, and what was perhaps more important we could see the ball throughout its flight, which we were seldom able to do during the transmissions [of lawn tennis] from Wimbledon last summer.
But the demonstration did more than establish a success for itself. It pointed the way to a whole range of new sports programmes for the future and at the same time went some distance towards solving the problem of allowing a large audience to watch such court games as squash rackets and fives.
The correspondent, who seems likely to have been a squash player, was convinced that soon cameras would be transmitting squash’s Amateur Championships into thousands of homes. Not that it worked out quite like that; although I recall seeing the occasional game of squash on screen, I can’t think that even in the outer reaches of Sky Sports ‘fives’ has developed much of a following.
Far more valuable than such speculation, given that of course we have no recordings of these pre-war broadcasts, is the column’s detailed description of the television presentation.
One of the features… was the excellence of the lighting and the absence of those tiresome shadows which sometimes find their way into television programmes. The lighting used must have been of considerable power, but al no time was there any suggestion that it was gelling in the eyes of the players or interfering with the game…
Barna and the English players demonstrated how they executed such strokes as the backward nip, the forehand drive, the half volley and the long-distance chop, and then Barna played Filby, a member of the English team, in a twenty-one point match and beat him 21-14.
Two cameras were used for the demonstration, one giving a general view of play looking diagonally across the table, the other focussed on Barna alone so that we could watch the details of his action. So far as the limitations of space allowed, camera work was consistently good.
The test of camera work in a programme of this sort is whether viewers are being shown what they themselves would most probably be looking at if they were present in the studio, standing in the camera’s place. Where the shots of Barna were concerned there could have been no possible complaint.
The diagonal views, however, were less successful. A standard size table was used, and it apparently took up so much of the studio that the camera was not able to get sufficiently far back. So that during the Barna-Filby match, when we should have been getting a long-shot of both players with the table between them, what we saw most of the time was just the top of the table, with the ball travelling to and fro across it, and the hands and arms of the players whenever they came close to the net.
That the exigencies of space should have spoiled an otherwise excellent programme was bad luck for the producer (and for the viewer too for that matter) and we can only hope that in the near future A. P. will get the extra space it needs if programmes of this sort are to be developed. They certainly deserve to be developed.
Incidentally, Margaret Osborne, who passes without notice by The Listener, won five World Table Tennis Championship medals, including a gold when she was a member of the winning team in the 1947 World Table Tennis Championships. Under her married name of Mrs B.W. Knott, she also played in the Wimbledon lawn tennis championships from 1949 to 1952.
Incidentally too, such was the allure of Victor Barna, some three decades later when I played at school (and fairly decently too, if I’m allowed to say so), my favourite bat was branded with his name.
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