Armchair Nation by Joe Moran Page B

entries to
Inventors’ Club
– an ‘ionette’ to iron out face wrinkles, a blow-as-you-go foot warmer for those allergic to hot water bottles, an electric dog to scare off burglars, a plughole to make the bath water run away silently without gurgling, a gadget for whisking off bed-clothes – proved, as one critic said, ‘that we are still the race from which sprang Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear’. The brainwaves were a barometer of postwar preoccupations: Hardern received a hundred different versions of a woolwinder submitted by arm-weary husbands of knitters, ninety-six cinder sifters for coal fires and several corporal punishment machines for caning schoolboys. He claimed to have had only one good idea from a woman, an iron with four little retractable legs that served as a stand.
Inventors’ Club
suggested a growing sense of involvement in the medium among viewers, although there was no need to own a television to contribute, and many of its inventors had never seen it. 12
    Algernon Blackwood, then nearly eighty, was a favourite on
Saturday Night Story
. He appeared first in the Halloween broadcast on 1 November 1947, telling a tale, ‘The Curate and the Stockbroker’, in which the stockbroker disappeared. Alarmed viewers rang the switchboard when Blackwood, through the use of two identical chairs and a screen dissolve, was also made to disappear, while his echoing voice remained. Blackwood needed no script and refused to rehearse. Hewould take the Underground to Wood Green and walk the mile and a half up the hill to the studio, making up the story as he went, emerging out of the darkness and entering for a light dusting of makeup before appearing on camera with moments to spare. He had mastered the art of talking to the individual viewer, greeting them while seated in an armchair, before laying his book aside, taking off his glasses, brushing his eyelids and leaning forward to begin his tale. He told haunting stories based on his years of travel in frontier Canada, the Black Forest and the Danube marshes, and his long absorption in mysticism and magic. He always finished dead on time, though the sharp-eyed viewer might notice his gaze wandering towards the clock overhead. 13
    â€˜Here’s Terry-Thomas to help you sell more sets,’ proclaimed an advertisement for Baird televisions in a trade magazine, exhorting retailers to use his face in cinemas to attract more viewers. In
How Do You View?
, Thomas played a cash-strapped, amiable bounder presenting the show from his bachelor pad. Even on black-and-white sets, his gold-banded Dunhill’s cigarette holder and brocade waistcoat shone. A
Picture Post
article, ‘The dandy comes back to W.1’, argued that Thomas ‘must be given much of the credit for the return of flowered waistcoats – he will lay you two to one that you cannot stand for three minutes outside the display window of the Piccadilly shop which supplies him with them, without hearing his name mentioned’. He was sent cufflinks, cravats and cummerbunds by viewers, and Thomas aimed the programme very directly at them. ‘I think that if you have an audience in the studio you play to it,’ he explained. ‘The viewer at home becomes just an old auntie watching the show from the side of the stage, instead of being the person the show should be directed straight at.’ At the start of each episode a tight close-up brought his full face on to the screen. ‘How do you
view
? Are you frightfully
well
? You
are
? Oh, good
show
!’, he would say. The camera went in even tighter on his gap-toothed grin, magically sweeping past the gap and dissolving into the next scene. Seven-year-old Sarah Miles, watching with her family in Essex, sometimes ‘laughed so much that Mummy would scold me for peeing on the sofa cushions’. 14
    But most loved were the three main announcers: Sylvia Peters,Mary Malcolm and McDonald Hobley, who was