OTD in early British television: 21 March 1939
John Wyver writes: Starting at 2.55pm on Tuesday 21 March 1939, the television service carried a 16-minute outside broadcast from Victoria Station where the King and Queen greeted His Excellency the President of the French Republic and Madame Lebrun.
Michael Standing and John Snagge were the commentators during a broadcast which included shots of the crowds gathered outside the station; the scene of greeting on the platform with, among others, the Dukes and Duchesses of Gloucester and Kent, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Lascelles; shots of the arrival of the state coaches and the departure of the procession. For the acute critic Grace Wyndham Goldie, this was an occasion of signal significance.
Later in the day in honour of President Lebrun, the schedule included Les Jeux d’eaux, a programme of French music and dances from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; an edition of News Map about France and its empire; and a staging of Molière’s L’Avare in Lady Gregory’s version under the title The Miser.
But it was the OB of the scene at Victoria that, in her weekly Listener column (30 March 1939), Wyndham Goldie recognised as portending a new world. The rest of this blog post reproduces extracts from her reflections.
When I saw direct televising last week of the arrival of President Lebrun in London I was filled with excitement. There was, of course, the excitement or the thing itself. No one who has, as I have, a taste for royalty, pageantry, processions of state, military bands and the emotions engendered by sharing humbly in historical events, could have failed to enjoy it.
We were privileged spectators. We saw well. We sat in our armchairs and watched the crowds and the sanded streets and the policemen on their horses and the flags fluttering and great people arriving in their cars.
We had excellent views or the King and Queen walking en to the platform and talking and waiting. We had excellent views, even ir they were a little dimmed by the murky light of Victoria Station, of the Presidential train drawing up and of Madame Lebrun stepping down from it… [and of] the King and the President as we saw them driving off. Yes, certainly there was all that. And it was exciting enough.
But there was something more. For it was impossible, as we sat and watched, not to realise that here at work was a great new instrument of news, an instrument which is bound to be of the most momentous importance, an instrument which is bound to give a new colour to all our information.
For television news has a flavour which is quite different from the flavour of broadcast news or newspaper news or news-reel news. It has the unmistakable feeling of direct experience. And it dares, as no other medium dares, to present us with reality as it is.
Why can it do this? Because television news is red-hot news. Nobody knows it before we do. We are in the position of the reporters of the papers, of the camera-men who take the news-reels, of the broadcast commentators.
We, sitting in our armchairs at home, wait with the King and Queen. We share, but without responsibility, the tension of the officials (will the unexpected happen? Suppose something goes wrong?). We share the tension of the crowds and their accumulated excitement.
And the result of it all is that, when Madame Lebrun steps out on to the platform, this is not just an event at which we gaze with interest. It is a moment charged with concentrated feeling. It is the awaited dramatic climax of a long sequence of happenings.
It is because television news has these qualities of suspense and drama that it grips us as no other news can do. And it is because it has these things that it can afford to present us with reality uncoloured by the personality of the reporter, of the [radio] broadcast commentator and or the news-film cutter.
… And so in television as in real life we could watch eagerly, while we waited for the King, a policeman patting his horse and a Lifeguardsman adjusting his harness. And because television can give us all these the whole thing seems real. It is real. And all other news is, in a sense, less actual and less true. So there we have it. That’s the other cause of excitement.
This great new instrument of news is also an instrument of truth.
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