Yet another BBC repeat – Britain’s very first night of television

Corporation to recreate the ‘mad night’ of 1936 broadcast to mark 80 years since original transmission

PERFORMANCES from a pair of tapdancing singers and a troupe of platespinning Chinese acrobats may sound like the line-up from a Saturday night ITV talent show.

However, 80 years have passed since vaudeville duo Buck and Bubbles, and jugglers the Lai Founs strode into the studio in Alexandra Palace, in London, for what became the official first night of the BBC Television Service.

Now the corporation is to recreate what it said was a “mad night” of the “cogs and gears, electron beams and dancing girls” that made up the first evening of broadcasting on British television. The BBC has rebuilt every element of the studio from scratch, including John Logie Baird’s mechanical cameras, and will use filming techniques dating back to the 1930s.

No footage of the historic transmission, on Nov 2, 1936, was ever retained in the archives, and only 400 households had purchased televisions that cost the equivalent of £15,000.

Cassian Harrison, the controller of BBC Four, which will recreate the evening’s performances, said the show would trace how the corporation had wrestled with the development of two competing camera technologies.

He said: “It was like VHS versus Betamax. One involved you having to sit in a pitch black box, coated in green paint, so the camera could see you. The other one had a Heath-Robinson kind of electronic system which led to the pictures being delayed by nearly a minute.”

The first broadcast ended up using Logie Baird’s mechanical system, which needed total darkness to operate. Leslie Mitchell, the compere for the show, had to be painted with heavily contrasted make-up, to highlight his cheekbones and eyes, in order to be picked out by the camera.

The show will be presented by Dallas Campbell and two engineering experts, Prof Danielle George, and Dr Hugh Hunt, who have painstakingly recreated Logie Baird’s filming technology, including a seven-foot tall device nicknamed the “flying spot”, which contained a huge steel disc that span at nearly the speed of sound.

None of the performers who appeared in the original programme are still alive, but producers have traced Paul Reveley, a 104-year-old engineer who worked with Logie Baird from 1932, to help with the reconstruction.

Opening Night: How the Box was Born will air on Nov 2, on BBC Four.

The BBC has recruited a 104-year-old friend of John Logie Baird to help to reconstruct a historic television transmission from Alexandra Palace in 1936. It was not quite the first broadcast, for The Daily Telegraph’s L Marsland Gander had by then been writing columns for more than a year as the world’s first television critic. That career began when his editor ordered him to get a television for the office. “B-but there aren’t any,” Gander stammered, “And even if there were, there’s no transmission.” But he found an apparatus, and test-broadcasts too. “The best closeup was that of Gerald Kassen, the bass-baritone, in Russian dress,” he wrote on February 7 1935. But he wondered whether inlookers (as viewers were then called) would be satisfied with a short programme daily. In that doubt he was a true prophet.