BBC BIMBLES
Five more walks on the trail of BBC heritage.
Hidden on the south side of this Surrey Hills gem is Swiss Cottage, which in 1929 was rented by John Logie Baird. He built a small electricity generating plant at the house to provide electrical power for his experiments.
One of his first test transmissions was to the roof of the Red Lion Hotel on Dorking High Street.
This cluster of masts south of Ludlow was built by the BBC during the Second World War to provide short-wave transmissions across Europe. During the Cold War it was leased to US broadcaster Voice of America, which used its powerful short-wave capacity to transmit to the Eastern Bloc. You can walk past the site on the Herefordshire Trail.
This stately pile near Evesham was used by the BBC during the Second World War to listen for enemy radio broadcasts. It later became the home of the BBC’s Monitoring Service and then its Engineering Training Centre. The centre is still there, although the main building is now a swish hotel (thewoodnorton.com).
A trail across London exploring blue plaques at key sites from BBC history. Highlights include the homes of founding Director General Lord Reith (Barton Street, Westminster) and Una Marson, the first black woman to make shows for the BBC (Brunswick Park, Camberwell); Ealing
Studios and Marconi House. bbc.com/historyofthebbc/ research/heritage-trail/
They’d each provided innovative one-off broadcasts for the Beeb, including Baird’s transmission of the first-ever televised play,
The Man with a Flower in His Mouth, in June 1930. These had to be viewed on the small number of TV sets (which Baird called televisors) that had been sold publicly by that point.
In the summer of 1934, the government set up a committee to investigate the possibility of providing a daily schedule of high-definition programming. The BBC was given just 18 months to find a site, build facilities, and bring its proposed programming online. And so it was that the competing teams of Baird and EMI) were crammed together in adjoining studios in the hastily-acquired east wing of Alexandra Palace, given enough resources to build a transmitter mast, and told to give it their best shot.
Remarkably, they did it. Their first broadcast was transmitted to the Radio Show at Olympia in August 1936. It consisted of a variety show called
Here’s Looking at You which was then broadcast twice a day for two weeks, with Baird and EMI alternating transmission duties.
On November 2nd, the BBC Television Service officially began. It opened with some speeches, followed by Adele Dixon belting out her lovely anthem to the new medium. The opening was actually broadcast twice, first by Baird and then by EMI. Thus, as the BBC itself drily points out, its second programme was also its first repeat.
In short order, it was realised that EMI’s electrical high-definition system had much greater potential than Baird’s mechanical one, and the contract to provide television went to EMI.
But most importantly, television was up and running, and the world would never be the same. Sports commentary, event coverage and drama followed, and the first episode of Last of the Summer Wine wasn’t far behind. (Sorry.)
And it was here at Ally Pally that the race to bring television to life had been won.
By now, we’ve found ourselves at the Queen’s Wood Café, which like its neighbour has a chequered history. Built in 1898 as a woodkeeper’s lodge and tearoom, from the 1960s it fell into neglect and by 1998 it was a whisker from demolition when it was rescued by a local couple. It has become an ecological haven and a community asset – and it does great cake. It’s a fine place to contemplate the impact that the BBC has had on our lives, not just as listeners and viewers – but as walkers too.
Despite its profoundly urban roots, the BBC has always brought us stories from the outdoors, even before walking was ‘cool’. In the mid-Eighties, the Beeb brought us Wainwright, in which Eric Robson teamed up with legendary guidewriter Alfred Wainwright (in glorious later-life irascibility) to explore the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the Borders. Skip forward to 2007 and that series