OTD in early British television: 23 February 1939
John Wyver writes: Characterised by The Times as ‘an animated scene’, the interior of the Marble Arch Pavilion cinema was packed on the evening of 23 February 1939 with ‘an audience of men and women who were evidently boxing enthusiasts.’
Every seat was taken and some 70 others were standing against the walls, and there were excited cries of ‘Go it Eric’ and waves of applause. The occasion was the large-screen showing of the fight between Eric Boon and Arthur Danahar (above), an event of singular significance in the history of pre-war television.
The BBC outside broadcast of the boxing match was coming from Harringay Arena, and was also being beamed into London homes, and onto the screens of the Tatler, owned like the Pavilion by the entertainment conglomerate Gaumont-British (G-B), and of the Monseigneur News Theatre, which was right next door to the Pavilion. ‘Large numbers of police,’ it was reported, ‘had to be on duty at Marble Arch, turning away those who had failed to get admission to the packed news theatres.’
Working with John Logie Baird, G-B had over the past two years been developing a technical system for ‘cinema-television’, the projection of live electronic images in film theatres. After much negotiation, the Boon-Danahar fight was the first BBC broadcast of an event to be shown in this way with the BBC’s somewhat reluctant permission.
The Observer’s unnamed film correspondent (in fact, C.A. Lejeune) responded:
The BBC is to be congratulated on having made at last a gesture which should do much to break the existing state of tension between the new and the old entertainment forms of television and the cinema – a tension which should never have been allowed to arise in the first place. All entertainment is one industry.
To the press and all others, the corporation stressed that this was an exceptional arrangement and that no precedent was being set, and also that the technical presentation would be designed solely for the home audience.
The match itself, who took place in front of a live crowd of 13,000, saw 19-year-old Eric Boon successfully defend his British lightweight crown against a fighter who himself was only 20. ‘The fight was one of the most dramatic seen for years,’ hymned one sports journalist, who noted that in the early rounds the challenger Arthur Danahar was ‘boxing with beautiful precision’.
But the referee finally stopped the fight in the fourteenth round, the last but one, when Danahar had gone down eight times for a count and then a ninth which reached nine.
Two BBC cameras were focussed on the ring, one for a general shot and one for close-ups which was apparently employed for much of the time, and there was a third in the dressing-rooms for pre- and post-bout interviews.
Critic and playwright Campbell Dixon, watching at the Pavilion, penned a vivid description:
The brilliance of the arc lamps over the ring caused a white haze which, with the enlargement to a screen 15 feet by 12 feet, somewhat blurred definition…
Fortunately the boxers were unusually easy to distinguish. Boon, short, crouching with the bobbing and weaving style of an American, Danahar, tall, slim and upright, shooting forth his classic British left like a piston, were quite unmistakeable. I have seen many a fight from the ringside that did not compare in drama and intensity with this battle of shadows.
The Gaumont-British newsreel also featured the fight, respecting corporate synergy by including 8 seconds of the broadcast feed with a close-up of Boon before the match.
G-B’s head Isidore Ostrer immediately ordered twelve more of the conglomerate’s cinemas in London to be equipped with Baird cinema-television systems. In more hyperbolic mood by the weekend, Ostrer promised that the apparatus would be installed in all 350 of the company’s cinemas, although the war interrupted these plans.
Cinema-television nonetheless was a significant potential disruptor in the story of pre-war television, which I explore fully in my forthcoming book, Magic Rays of Light: The Beginnings of Television in Britain.
Absolutely fascinating, like many of your OTD posts. Apart from the boxers being totally unknown today, this level of interest in ’39 is remarkable. And to think how TV and cinema might have continued symbiotically… but WW2 would change everything. And give us P&P..
Thanks, Ian. Rank continued with cinema television research in the post-war years, but were eventually stymied by the Post Office refusing to licence broadcast transmission of original programmes to cinemas. Laying cabling was just too expensive. But much of the energy and capital from this went into the various bids for the first ITV franchises. All of this is a story I want to tell in detail at some point.
Of course, it is when programming can be sent directly to cinemas, via satellite, and when those cinemas have digital projectors that it is possible for Met Opera Live in HD, NTLive and the rest to enter this space.