1938 BBC TV Broadcast

[CharlieH.]

In my never-ending quest for rare historical (and free) footage, I stumbled upon this particularly fascinating glimpse into 1930's television-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DUFj_AlCuo

Pretty unfortunate this has no sound, but the sights are pretty amazing in my opinion!

[Fletch]

Incredible. Not a "color broadcast" of course, but home movies taken at the studios. We have almost nothing like this from the US at the time - we were doing TV, but it was a corporate secret everywhere it was being done.

[scotrace]

Great footage!

[dhermann1]

You can really see in some of the shots how they needed absolute floodlights to get an image. They had to put on make up that exaggerated the contrast in their features as well. It's so interesting to see real people in context thru films like this, even actors. I love the suave Terry-Thomas-without-a-gap host, and the nervous producer. These shots bear a lot of looking at! Wonderful detail!
One reason Britain developed TV was that it used essentially the same technology as radar, and they knew this would help them build the manufacturing infrastructure to produce radar in the future. I saw one amusing discussion concerning the issue of what to call people who watched TV. Viewer, watchers, etc. One person suggested describing TV viewers as "gazers in".
Once the war started, they pulled the plug on the broadcasts in the middle of a show without any warning. Poof. And I believe that when TV came back after the war, it used a technoloogy that had more lines per screen, rendering all 100,000 existing prewar sets obsolete. But Britain was really the only country to have a full TV industry up and running before WWII.

[CharlieH.]

Legend has it that when the germans invaded Poland, BBC shut down their TV broadcasts right in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. In 1946, when the service was re-established, an announcer apologised for the "rude interruption" and resumed the cartoon right where it stopped! Don't know how true is that.

And regarding the make-up, it appears that BBC's technology was superior to that used in the states - compare the faces from the film to this!

[Sefton]

Very neat stuff. Fun to see people behind the scenes. Some it looks very fresh. The same youtube page has links to some interesting color footage from Tokyo in 1935 that I've seen before-it's worth looking at. No sound again though...

That make up is scary..yow!

[CharlieH.]

The same youtube page has links to some interesting color footage from Tokyo in 1935 that I've seen before-it's worth looking at. No sound again though...

There's actually another upload of the same footage with narration.... in japanese, that is!
There's an inexplicably large amount of 1930's colour film from Japan on the 'tube (but that's another thread).

[LizzieMaine]

More footage from 1938 -- this time taken off an RCA monitor in New York by a 16mm camera. Sunspot skip made it possible for the BBC signals to show up on the other side of the pond for a few days in the fall of 1938, and this footage is the only surviving documentation of it...

http://www.apts.org.uk/bbctv.rm

The blonde woman in the tight headshot is Jasmine Bligh, one of the two female announcers used by the BBC to introduce programs and read continuity. Her colleague Elizabeth Cowell may also be visible in another scene, but it's hard to be sure. In any case, this is the earliest known specimen of a "kinescope recording."

[Fletch]

Anyone seen the real mystery footage - 5 min of an NBC costume drama filmed offscreen (silent and at silent speed) in 1939? The Museum of TV & Radio got this via an anonymous donor - no one knows who filmed it or why, and nothing similar has turned up since.

[LizzieMaine]

I think that footage has been ID'd as scenes from "The Streets Of New York," which aired in early 1939, and there's evidence that the footage was edited down from a longer reel. There were experiments at NBC during the late thirties with methods for filming off monitors, none of which supposedly amounted to anything, so possibly this reel is a surviving sample of that.

There's quite a bit of pre-war NBC-TV *audio* at the Library of Congress -- including a complete audio linecheck of the first night of commercial service of WNBT in July 1941. No video, though.