Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Page A

were worthy of the high-minded ideals of its first director general, John Reith. The problem with radio, concluded its researchers, was ‘the difficulty of persuading listeners to keep their fingers from the tuning knob long enough for the programme to secure an entering wedge upon their attention’. Television, by contrast, might be able to ‘enlist the interest of its public in new or unfamiliar fields’. When Mass Observation did a survey of prospective television owners in the spring of 1949, some thought that concentrated viewing in a semi-darkened room was better than absent-minded radio listening, while others worried that it required too total a commitment. ‘There are so many things I can do in my leisure time while listening to and enjoying the wireless, for example, reading, carving and modelling, gardening,’ said a 32-year-old school teacher. ‘I am so afraid that television would proveso attractive that my spare time would be spent straining my eyes looking into a fixed distance screen.’ 8
    Nella Last was not alone, then, among non-viewers in complaining that the nine-by-seven-inch screens were too small, a belief probably encouraged by the large Perspex magnifying glasses attached to some of them and the fact that people often saw them neck-craning among a jostling crowd on the pavement outside a radio shop. But this was not a complaint heard from television owners. ‘This supposed shortcoming of television is voiced only by those who are not viewers,’ John Swift assured potential set buyers in his book
Adventures in Vision
, ‘and who base their assumptions on an inspection of a “dead”, white screen in a shop window.’ Like Nella Last, two-thirds of Britons had never even seen a television working. An image of the Alexandra Palace mast was now shown every night on the opening credits of Television Newsreel, its pulsing signals seeming to broadcast to the whole world to the tune of a confident wartime march, Charles Williams’s ‘Girls in Grey’. But the chalk hills of the Chilterns and the North Downs still formed a natural barrier against these signals, albeit a permeable one. The BBC’s one known viewer in the Channel Islands reported pictures of ‘excellent entertainment value’. 9

    Some postwar television personalities were already starting to emerge. Joan Gilbert, the presenter of the revived
Picture Page
, was an effervescent character prone to stumbling over her lines, laughing for no reason, and saying ‘mmm’ a lot while the interviewee was speaking as if she were preparing for the next question. She was, according to the theatre critic Harold Hobson, ‘rather too boisterous for any but the biggest sets’. 10
    A tall, bespectacled, gas board official called Leslie Hardern, with a passing resemblance to the ascetic Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, presented
Inventors’ Club
, introducing back bedroom inventions sent in by viewers. The programme had been born in theeconomic crisis of September 1947, when Hardern went on holiday to the French Riviera in the last boatload of tourists to leave the country that year without needing government approval. Convinced that new products were needed for an export drive to rescue the country from economic oblivion, Hardern decided to use television to harness British engineering ingenuity. As soon as each programme ended, the BBC would receive enquiries from manufacturers. Mr H. M. Bickle from Ealing, who had invented a hand cream which could be used in place of soap and water by making dirt roll up into small balls and fall off, generated much interest – although it was his cardboard and metal container, ‘the Bickle tube’, that went into production. Mr Gill from Pudsey caused a similar stir with his washing machine that could also wash and dry dishes, peel potatoes and mix dough – but it remained in the prototype stage. 11
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