OTD in early British television: 19 February 1938
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Saturday 19 February 1938 saw high drama enacted in and around Alexandra Palace. Fire Up Aloft was a 25-minute fire-fighting demonstration given by members of the Enfield Fire Brigade, with the full-hearted participation of Jasmine Bligh, above.
The broadcast was a ‘local OB’, achieved by taking studio cameras onto the terrace adjacent to the studio building but keeping them cabled to the internal control room. This was a programme form that was very popular right at the start of the AP service, although with the arrival of the mobile control unit transmissions of golf lessons and model aircraft displays in the park came to seem rather tame. Not so Fire Up Aloft.
The detailed description in the Programme-as-Broadcast report allows us to follow along with the action. The transmission began with Jasmine in the studio reading, smoking and listening to the radio. Tiring of the song ‘Midnight in Mayfair’ she switched programmes, only to hear, well, Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird Suite’. And in doing so she knocked her lighted cigarette into a wastepaper basket.
Having failed to beat out the flames, she ran off to attract the attention of the AP fireman. He too was unable to quell the fire and so had to break the glass on a dummy fire alarm to call the local brigade.
Cut to ‘fire station sequence’ provided by the BBC Film Library, which presumably had been specially shot for the programme. The brigade arrived, ran up their 30-metre Merryweather all-steel turntable escape ladder, down which plucky Jasmine was carried to safety before the fire was extinguished.
Not that this was the end of the simulated drama. A man then fell under the cowcatcher on the front of the fire engine, and had to be extricated by means of an oxyacetylene torch before being whisked away by a waiting ambulance.
All of which was summarised at the end of the programme by the avuncular Leslie Mitchell, perched on top of the extended ladder. And the watching public was reassured that they could sleep safely in their beds that night. As long, that is, as they weren’t tempted to try to listen to Stravinsky.
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