OTD in early British television: 28 January 1939
John Wyver writes: Let us return to table tennis on television. A week ago on this blog, we saw a studio demonstration on 22 January 1938. A year on, on Saturday 28 January 1939, we can travel with one of mobile units to the Empire Pool, Wembley [link: a fascinating Guardian article from 1934] for an outside broadcast of part of the men’s singles final played under the auspices of the English Table Tennis Association. Writing in The Listener, Peter Purbeck compared the experience with watching lawn tennis from Wimbledon, and decided that ‘of the two table tennis makes the better television.’
The match was between two of the table tennis’s champions, 18-year-old Czech Bohumil Váňa and ‘one of the greats of the sport’, Vienna-born Richard Bergmann. Not that Purbeck saw fit to mention the competitors, but he did leave us with a vivid description of the broadcast along with determinedly grumpy comments about the commentary. Plus, his article was illustrated with these evocative images.
First, his article notes one of those things that happened all the time with pre-war television, but which barely leaves a trace in the archives. ‘Something went wrong with the transmitter,’ he noted, ‘and the quality of the picture was poor.’ The service in these early days, and indeed well into the post-war period, was subject to frequent breakdowns and below-par images and sound. Even so, for Purbeck,
It speaks well for the entertainment value of table tennis on television that in spite of this lack of quality in the pictures, the programme was an extremely good one.
He continued with his comparison to the current state of the broadcasts from Wimbledon, where
the action takes place over a comparatively wide area and in order to provide a satisfactory view it is necessary to employ a number of cameras and switch repeatedly from one to the other. Table tennis is a far more compact affair.
Unless one is sitting right al the middle of the table, there is no need for the constant turning of the head which makes lawn tennis tiring to watch in reality, and difficult to handle on television. The table game is small enough in its field of action to be watched in comfort from a single viewpoint.
Alexandra Palace chose a view looking down on the table from a corner, so that one player had his back to the camera and the other faced us.
For Purbeck this overall master shot, with presumably far fewer transitions than was already the case at Wimbledon, was his preferred way of watching a contest. Indeed, his only quarrel with the programme was with the commentary.
Now it often happens with outside broadcasts that the same commentary is used on both television and sound wavelengths. In such cases we who are watching are always prepared to accept a certain amount of verbiage which we could well do without, simply for the sake of other listeners who do not have the advantage of vision.
But on Saturday the programme was on the television wavelengths alone. Now Mr. Stewart MacPherson, the commentator, is an exponent of the racy transatlantic technique mainly known in this country through the medium of the newsreels.
Those who practise it evidently hold the opinion that the secret of success in a running commentary is that the speaker should never on any account stop talking. This method may have its advantages in sound broadcasting but in television it is, to my mind at least, just a nuisance…
In Mr. MacPherson’s case the trouble was to some extent aggravated by his referring to the players as being in blue or red in order to distinguish them, when to viewers both of them were wearing the same shade of grey.
It is only fair to say, however, that last Saturday’s commentary was the exception in television rather than the rule. Alexandra Palace have already adopted, as a precept for outside broadcasts, the slogan that ‘the camera is the commentator’.
MacPherson was a Canadian who had begun sports commentating on BBC radio in late 1937, and who Wikipedia tells us, was
a popular voice on BBC radio, becoming known as “the fastest voice in radio”, and occasionally showing “a willingness to go a little beyond the BBC’s rules of decorum”.
During the war he was a distinguished radio journalist, and later he hosted programmes including In-Town Tonight and Twenty Questions.
The producer at Wembley that evening was Philip Dorté who after the war, as head of television outside broadcasts, would oversee BBC Television’s triumphant coverage of the 1948 London Olympics, on which MacPherson worked, and was later Midlands Controller of the ITV company ATV.
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