OTD in early British television: 18 February 1939
John Wyver writes: Just after 10pm on Saturday 18 February 1939 the AP schedule carried an unbilled 3-minute item titled Special Transmission. This was a short interview with the Mr Edgar Charloe of Acton about his suggestion for a ‘Viewer’s Club’.
The broadcast followed up a recent article that ‘The Scanner’ wrote for Radio Times prompted by a letter for Mr Charloe and reflecting on the idea of ‘a club or society of viewers’. Although the idea seems not to have developed, the discussion is perhaps one of the earliest indications of concerns about television, isolation and sociability. Plus, the Programme-as-Broadcast information solves the mystery of the identity of ‘The Scanner’, although only for the pre-war years.
‘The Scanner’ was the byline on the Radio Times’ television diary column before and after the Second World War. The collection of paragraphs each week is a wonderful source for production information in these early years, and just occasionally this figure penned longer pieces. As they did for the edition published on 3 February under the headline ‘Club for Television Viewers?’ (above).
Mr Charloe had owned a television receiver only since Christmas Eve, but, as ‘The Scanner’ reflected, ‘he makes up with enthusiasm what he lacks in experience.’ And he quoted from Mr Charloe’s letter:
I trust that my scheme for a viewers’ society is practical… I feel sure that it could do a great deal of good all round.
‘The Scanner’ was all in favour, not least because of a recent brief encounter with the man who lived next door:
Practical or not, there is every reason why some sort of organisation should exist. A week or two ago I was introduced to a neighbour of mine. We talked sweet nothings until I said as a brother-viewer I was glad to see his roof was graced with a television aerial. A reaction of delight was immediate; it was like the meeting of two anglers.
To think you’ve been hiding your aerial in your loft all this time! ‘ he said. ‘ I wish I had known. We could have got together sooner.’ Getting together. The implications of the phrase had never attracted me. But now I realise what I have missed for more than two years—interesting chats with an intelligent viewer who is an ordinary man-in-the-street, not connected with the BBC, the Press, or the radio industry.
The exchanges with the figure who ‘The Scanner’ characterised as ‘Mr. Every Viewer’ involved our professional receiving ‘a lively critique of television programmes and an idea of what the average viewer is curious about’, while as an insider he was able to pass on ‘behind-thescenes information—why this was done and that wasn’t, why certain effects are practicable in a film studio and impracticable at Alexandra Palace.’
Mr. Every Viewer, ‘The Scanner’ was convinced, was now better-informed and happier as a television viewer, and he thought that there must be hundreds of other Acton dwellers who would also be interested in ‘talking shop’ about television.
Without wearing badges or having secret passwords written in blood, viewers can band themselves into a body that would help themselves, the BBC, and the radio industry all at the same time. Personal contact by the BBC television staff with individual viewers is out of the question, obviously. With a viewers’ society meeting regularly at local centres I don’t doubt that it could be found possible for producers and other key men at Alexandra Palace to meet those at the other end of the television wave.
Ideas could be exchanged and, most important of all, viewers could be given first-hand descriptions of what television production entails and be kept in touch with new developments by those responsible for them. I don’t doubt, too, that dealers and manufacturers would be eager to take advantage of the opportunity of meeting viewers in the mass.
Apart from suggesting that television-derived isolation might become an issue, the column also speaks of the concern at the time of the slow sales of television sets, even though this was picking up after Radiolympia the previous September.
Set manufacturers and dealers were pressing AP to introduce more popular programmes and to extend the hours of transmission. Meeting members of a viewer’s club might well be a way not only of developing a more informed and engaged audience, but also of simply selling more sets.
‘The Scanner’ ended their column with an exhortation to write in care of Radio Times, a request that was repeated in the magazine a few weeks later. But apart from the Special Transmission 86 years ago nothing more seems to have come of the idea.
Moreover, the PasB information detailed in Andrew S. Martin’s essential Sound & Vision volume 4, featuring programme listings from September 1938 to February 1939, reveals the identity of ‘The Scanner’, since he was also interviewed by (and identified as such) by S.E. Reynolds for the broadcast. He was Radio Times staff journalist Harold Rathbone, who under his own name also wrote a small number of longer features. One of his articles, ‘Who invents the jokes for Band Waggon?’, from November 1939, can be found here.
In the 1930s Rathbone married Eileen Goodwin, who also worked for the corporation, and their son Richard became professor of African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Richard Rathbone’s recent Guardian obituary reveals that his father became a pilot and was killed in action. Which means that after the war, one or more other writers continued to contribute to Radio Times as ‘The Scanner’.
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