John Baird; The Man With The Flower in His Mouth

Steve Hawley

‘Baird himself was always exploring the fringes of his imperfect medium,

taking up one experiment after another, more with the passion of an artist

than the prudence of a scientist’

Briggs. The Golden Age of Wireless 1965

Picture the scene. It is three thirty in the afternoon on 14th July 1930,

and the first BBC television broadcast of a play is drawing to a close. The

play is no lightweight knockabout comedy or melodrama, it is in fact Luigi

Pirandello’s one act drama “The Man With The Flower In His Mouth”, written

only three years earlier.

On the roof of John Logie Baird’s studios at 133 LongAcre, Covent

Garden, a simultaneous broadcast of the play is taking place on the world’s

first large TV screen. It may be only ten square feet, but this is practically

IMAX compared to the ten square inches that Baird’s television sets usually

run to. An invited audience of VIPs, including signor Marconi himself , has

been winched up the outside of the building on a dangerous open-air goods

hoist, to stand in a tarpaulin tunnel and witness the historic screening.

The screen is five feet high by two feet wide, and has been

constructed with Baird’s usual mixture of inspiration and cack-handedness. It

is made up of 2,500 incandescent light bulbs, which are red hot, and have

started to melt its edges. A frantic message comes to the studio below to stop
the broadcast, but the producer, Lance Sieveking, appeals to Baird. “He was

a man with a tremendous sense of occasion”, Sieveking recalled. “He said

‘Tell ‘em to go right ahead and let it melt’”.

It would not have been the first time that an invention of Baird’s had

melted, exploded, or caused near serious injury. Nonetheless the screening

marked the transition of TV from entertaining novelty to creative medium. The

Man With The Flower In His Mouth was the first great artistic acheivement of

television; a combination of Sieveking’s artistic flair and Baird’s flawed,

eccentric, but ultimately visionary genius.

Among the viewers of the large screen on the studio roof was the

booking agent of the nearby London Coliseum. Thus two weeks later Baird

British Television was hired for a fortnight’s run at the theatre.The screen was

set up on the stage and received live broadcasts from Baird’s studios. This

was the first recorded demonstration of interactive TV, as via a phone link

from the stage to the studio the audience could make requests and ask

questions of the celebrity performers. Among the rather odd assortment of

celebrities who made gestures in response to viewers’ requests were the

boxer ‘Bombadier’ Billy Wells, scout leader Lord Baden-Powell, and British

fascist Oswald Moseley.

Two years earlier Baird had already demonstrated “Noctovision”, or

transmission of pictures in the dark, stereoscopic TV ,the videodisc (six

minutes of picture and sound on a 78rpm record) and colour TV ,albeit on a

screen one inch square. The latter was acheived by a Nipkow disc, the heart

of Baird’s system, fitted with green, blue, and red filters, and was successfully

shown to the public on 6th July 1928 (“....a basket of strawberries showed the
red fruit very clearly”). He actually intended to combine colour pictures with

3D TV, but never got down to the problem.

The broadcast of The Man With The Flower was the culmination of an

astonishing period of creativity, but it was also, ultimately, his apogee. His

own crude system was an evolutionary blind alley. What the world needed,

and what it got by 1935, was an electronic system which gave high definition,

and had no moving parts. In short it needed the cathode ray tube, and the TV

system which came about from the combined efforts of many scientists,

thousands of engineers, and the financial might of EMI and RCA. Baird’s

construction of biscuit tin lids and bicycle lamp lenses could not compete, and

yet , on his own apart from a small group of hand picked technicians, he

consistently stumbled into the unknown ahead of the rest. His crude

mechanical devices anticipated by several decades many media

developments of the late twentieth century.

Video art is always arbitrarily deemed to have begun with the invention

of the portable video recorder in 1965, and the seminal recording of the

Pope’s visit to New York by Nam June Paik. Television before this is

accepted to be mostly light entertainment, with sociological but not artistic

significance. In fact, the early pioneers of TV had to find their own language,

influenced by cinema, but also determined by technology, just as artists who

work in video do today.

The Man with the Flower in His mouth stretched the boundaries of

what was technologically and aesthetically possible on the TV screen. It was

not in fact even the first ever broadcast drama. Ten months earlier, the radio

station WGY in New York had broadcast a melodrama called “The Queen’s
Messenger”, written by one J. Hartley Manners, and Baird himself had

screened a play called “Box and Cox” performed by his loyal staff. But

Pirandello’s one act drama was the first serious theatre piece that had been

broadcast, with a talented producer and cast, and as Baird’s engineer Tony

Bridgewater acknowledged, Sieveking “exploited this primitive medium to the

utmost”.

And primitive it certainly was. Baird’s mechanical TV system was

based on the Nipkow disc, a revolving disc with a spiral of holes in it that

scanned the, hopefully immobile subject. In Baird’s case the disc was

originally the lid of a biscuit tin, pierced with thirty holes, into which were

inserted bicycle lamp lenses. Behind the lenses had been placed crude

photoelectric cells, and the apparatus also made use of other readymades,

such as carpet needles. Moreover the requirements of the system meant that

the actors had to perform in a space eighteen inches wide by three feet high,

only a little bit larger than a present day TV screen, in total darkness, whilst

being scanned by a flying spot of light. Dancers on his later broadcasts

complained that they ended up black and blue, as they kept falling over in the

dark. The camera was static and the actors had to slide in and out of the fixed

studio chair in order to deliver their lines.

The idea for the first BBC play had come from Baird’s indefatigable

publicist, Sydney Moseley, with Lance Sieveking as co-producer and Val and

his brother John Gielgud as principal actors. The play was chosen by Val

Gielgud, partly for its artistic merit, but mostly because it had only three

actors, plenty of long speeches, and little action. Sieveking was well known as

an experimental radio producer, especially to Moseley who had been a radio

critic. He regarded his co-producer as exceptionally imaginative, in fact “so

much so that in many of the early plays he produced it was hard to

understand what he was driving at”. The choice was inspired. If Moseley was

the showman, and Baird the unworldly prophet, then Sieveking was the

artistic engine who gave the whole project coherence.

Sieveking met with Baird’s engineers Tony Bridgewater and D.R.

Campbell, and examined the broadcasting apparatus. In addition to the

ludicrously cramped confines of the performing space, there were two other

problems. Faces without make-up appeared blurred, and without definition,

and also each time an actor got up from the performing chair to be replaced

by another actor, the picture wobbled and lost synchronisation for several

seconds.

Sieveking devised a fading board, like a large table tennis bat, which

was lowered in front of the performing space while the actors changed

places, but this was only a marginal improvement. Finally he replaced this

with a sliding board of black and white squares, like a chessboard, which,

surprisingly, worked. When pushed in front of the “camera”, the photo electric

cells were not disturbed, and relatively smooth transitions could be acheived.

Gielgud and Sieveking had already commissioned specially painted

backcloths by the then noted artist C.R.W. Nevinson. Given the definition of

the 30 line Baird system this was somewhat overoptimistic (modern TV has

625 lines). Moseley himself commented acidly that for all the viewers would

see of these they might have well used a sheet of newspaper or a household

duster.
 For the make-up, they discovered by trial and error that the best

results were acheived with the forehead and cheeks painted yellow, and

heavy blue lines accentuating features such as the nose. By the time the play

went into rehearsal the two Gielguds were unable to perform through illness

and had been replaced by Earl Gray as the man and Lionel Millard as the

customer. Gray found the rather peculiar make-up “strangely unnatural” and

not surprisingly was disturbed by the flickering spotlight. This was the first

recorded use of special television make-up.

The play had just two speaking parts, with a silent appearance by

Gladys Young as the Man’s tragic wife. A commuter who has missed his train

regales a stranger with the trivial causes of this catastrophe. The stranger

hints at a tragedy that has befallen him, that compels him to use his

imagination to participate in the lives of complete strangers. He then reveals

he has cancer of the mouth (the “Flower” of the title)

With an unconscious allusion to the future power of television,

Pirandello’s Man spends days passively watching, staring through shop

windows. ‘Helps me to forget myself’. He feels it attaches him to life. ‘I never

let it rest a moment - my imagination! I cling with it.... to the lives of other

people’.

Sieveking prepared a short explanatory announcement for the end of

the play by going to Southwold pier and making for sixpence an aluminium

record, at the end of which he clapped his own speech and hummed God

Save the King. Dennis Freeman and Brian Mitchie played music effects on a

portable gramophone, and the 16 year old George Innes, later producer of
the Black and White Minstrel Show, was effects boy, sliding the chequerboard

and taking care of the props.

The audience for the play was necessarily limited. Apart from the large

screen projection on the roof at LongAcre, it consisted of those who could

afford Baird’s domestic televisors, the cheapest of which was a then

staggering 25 guineas. Few had been sold because until March 1930 it had

been impossible to receive sound and vision at the same time. Because Baird

had access to only one transmitter, the picture was transmitted first, silent,

and then two minutes later the sound without pictures. This bizarre

arrangement continued until he was granted the use of two transmitters only

four months before the broadcast of The Man With the Flower. In addition,

apart from the viewers of the big screen the rest would see the play on a

screen the size of a postcard, the colour of which was usually not black and

white, but orange.

The production opened with printed captions, mandolin music in the

background, and a spoken introduction. There followed close ups of a glass

and a musical score, and a conductor’s hand with a violin bow, before the

cafe orchestra started up. These early television close ups were effected by

pushing the fading board in front of the camera as a sort of primitive wipe,

and placing the props in the four and a half square feet performance space

before the board was pulled back to reveal the scene.

There were other close ups in the play, including hands and objects on

a table. But what the audience saw was mostly the face of the Man or the

Customer. This was unsurprising given the limited space, but Sieveking also

managed to squeeze in a two shot. He found that if the back of the nearest
speaker’s head was seen with the face of the protagonist smaller beyond it,

this gave “a very satisfying effect of perspective”.

At the end the aluminium record was broadcast whilst a photograph of

the producer taken in profile was shown on the screen. A few days later the

BBC received amongst many letters, three from Birmingham, Dublin, and

Lisbon, asking why the last speaker had stood sideways to the camera, and

why his lips had not moved. It seemed that the brodcast had been received at

unimagined distances from LongAcre.

Baird lived on until just after the end of the second world war, but the

television world had moved on without him. He tried in the 1940s to market a

large screen “tele-radiogram” with a two by two and a half feet screen that

could receive BBC black and white as well as Baird’s own high definition

colour transmissions, and even his own stereoscopic system. It also had a

radio and an auto changing record player, a home cinema fifty years ahead of

its time. But his reliance on mechanical methods until almost the end ensured

his commercial failure. The Man With The Flower In His Mouth would remain

in creative terms his finest half hour.

The production also received the distinction of the first television

drama review by the Manchester Guardian. Unfortunately the TV critic not

having a set of his own, he had to rely on the set at a local store, where there

was a long queue to watch the play. The review ended plaintively “...I who

was there professionally, as it were, arrived at the screen at the instant of a

fade out”
Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless OUP 1965

The Guiness Book of television Facts and Feats

Moseley, Sydney, John Baird, Odhams Press 1952

Moss, Nicholas BBC TV Presents 1986

Norman, Bruce, Here’s Looking at You

Pirandello, Luigi, The Man With the Flower in His Mouth

Ross, Gordon, Television Jubilee, Allen 1986

Sieveking, Lance, Autobiographical Sketches

Smith, Anthony (ed), Television, OUP 1995

Wheen, Francis, Television, Century 1985