Tonight's invention was developed by a man who'd already given us

the thermal undersock and marmalade from the Caribbean,

and yet he would die a broken man.
It was exploited by the Nazis, and yet it would help Britain win the war.
It brought women out of the kitchen, it made us fat,
and without it, I simply wouldn't have a job.
So, three cheers, then, for the television.
We humans are bright, restless and endlessly curious, which is fine,
but being clever means that we get bored easily.
A dog, for instance, is perfectly happy to spend all day sniffing bottoms,
whereas I've usually had enough after one or two.
Maybe that's why, then, we devote so much time and energy
to thinking up new and exciting ways of amusing ourselves.
Before television, entertainment was, how can I put this, a little patchy.
Having said that, though, a good hanging would get the sort of audience
BBC 4 can only dream about.
For news, people mainly relied on word of mouth and idle gossip at the pub,
a bit like EastEnders.
And people would go to the theatre for unadulterated melodrama
that preferably ended in a fight,
a bit like Soldier, Soldier.
But then, along came TV and everything changed.
It rearranged our living rooms,
it introduced us to the concept of someone being famous for being famous,
and we got this, a programme called The UK's Worst Toilet.
Five million of you watched it.
That's one in 12 people in Britain thought,
no, we won't go to the theatre, we won't go and take the dog for a walk.
We'll stay in and watch a programme about lavatories.
Oh, there's one, look, there's one.
The television you're watching right now is not simply an entertainment machine.
It has incredible powers.
It has won wars, but it can make disaster out of a crisis.
It has liberated the oppressed, but caused societies to disintegrate.
In Europe, we have more TV sets than children
and spend nine years of our lives watching them.
The small screen dominates our existence.
And that's remarkable for a device that was brought to us
by the Scottish inventor of the pneumatic boot
and a 14-year-old Mormon from Utah.
But before then, it was Italian Guelmo Marconi
who started the ball rolling.
Marconi decided it might be possible to send messages across great distances
without wires.
Spurred on by the prospect of serious money,
he started work until, in 1895, the breakthrough came.
A gunshot confirmed the successful transmission
and the world of wireless telecommunications was born.
Marconi's invention was an instant success in shipping,
not least when an SOS from the Titanic saved the lives of 703 people.
And it didn't stop there.
Once it was discovered how to transmit actual speech,
the wireless era began in earnest.
Radio was a revolution in entertainment,
bringing the pub and the theatre and the hangings into your living room.
Scientists and the popular press began to speculate
about what the next step might be.
They figured that if radio waves could go through the air
and into people's houses, then why not pictures?
They even began to think about what such a thing might be called.
Radioscope.
Radio-vision.
Tele-ramophone.
Tele-phon-us-cope.
It was actually a Russian who came up with the idea
of combining the Greek word for long way away
with the Latin word for to see.
And there we are, television.
Now all someone had to do is make one.
At least 52 people contributed parts and ideas to the television.
All over the world, people were developing bits
without knowing how they could be used.
A Scotsman called Campbell Swinton
actually drew a complete design for an electronic TV,
but he didn't think it could be done and chucked it in the bin.
Then there was the German Paul Nipkoff, who, on Christmas Eve,
designed a disc that could scan images, as you do, if you have no friends.
But it was Nipkoff's spinning disc that inspired the work of an eccentric Brit,
an ideas man ahead of his time, John Logie Baird.
Like most inventors, actually, John Logie Baird was Scottish.
But he was a poorly man, constantly in ill health.
So he moved to the seaside town of Hastings.
Here, on the south coast.
Baird wrote in his diary,
coughing, choking and spluttering and so thin as to be almost transparent,
I arrived at Hastings station.
Assets totalling £200.
Prospects, nothing.
Baird suffered from two things.
Hypothyroidism, which made him weak,
and an enormous capacity for rubbish inventions, which made him poor.
He hoped the seaside air would revitalise his body and provide some inspiration.
He needed some.
In his 20s, he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite.
To get enough power, he tapped into the mains
and blew up Glasgow's entire power supply.
Another bright idea was to design a glass razor.
It was completely rust-resistant, which was good, but there were downsides.
Next, inspired by pneumatic tyres, he had a go at pneumatic shoes.
Baird's prototype contained semi-inflated balloons, which burst.
Baird then came up with a thermal undersock
and, remarkably, this was a modest success.
But Baird, by this time, was ill and his doctor advised a change of climate.
Leaving Glasgow and his girlfriend behind, he headed for Trinidad,
where he spent his sock money on marmalade.
His plan was to bottle it, export it, make his fortune and marry his girl.
But by the time it reached England, his nest egg was full of maggots
and had to be destroyed.
And to garnish his misfortune with even more misery,
his one true love went off and married someone with a proper job.
Desperate, ill and virtually penniless,
Baird came for a walk along this very coastal path just outside Hastings
and he thought, I've got to invent something.
I don't care what it is. Lava lamp, sandwich maker, rotating washing line,
anything.
After a while, he thought, wouldn't it be good
if instead of just hearing the person on the radio, you could see them as well?
And that fascinates me, because it's like me walking along and thinking,
wouldn't it be good to invent a time machine?
Yes, it would. I could go back and win loads of money on the horses.
But I have no idea what I might need.
Baird, on the other hand, being this mad kind of inspirational tinkerer,
scuttled back into town and went shopping.
Baird had no money, no lamp facilities,
no specialist expertise and no experience of electrical engineering.
But that didn't stop him.
In 1923, at 21 Linton Crescent in Hastings, he started work.
When you see what he collected,
it gives you an insight into the magnificently lateral mind of the inventor.
To make television, he got himself.
The lamp from the front of a bicycle,
a pair of scissors, a hat box, obviously.
Then there's the tea chest,
in which we find a selection of cotton bobbins
and some ceiling wax.
Then over here, we have the glue and the knitting needles.
And then, when he got himself the lid from a coffin,
he was ready to start work.
He used the coffin lid as a base.
He then took the lid off the hat box,
pierced holes through it in a spiral pattern,
used a knitting needle as a shaft and turned it into a scanning disc.
This converted the object in front of it into a series of lines.
The lines of light were then converted into an electrical signal,
which could then be transmitted to a light bulb,
which shone through a reverse scanning disc,
which reconstructed the original picture.
Understand that?
No, well, nor do I, but it worked.
In 1923, Baird managed to transmit the image of a cross.
Not exactly the UK's worst toilet, but we're on our way.
And Baird was delighted.
Unfortunately, however, he wasn't the only one working on the big idea.
Over in America, there was a Mormon boy from Idaho called Philo T Farnsworth.
Farnsworth was born in Utah, but in 1918, when young Philo was 11,
the family moved here to Rigby, Idaho,
which, like Hastings, is proud to call itself the birthplace of television.
The family really couldn't afford any books,
so he did not have a lot of education,
but when they arrived at the ranch in Rigby that had this Delco power plant,
he found in the attic of the bungalow ranch
a treasure trove of scientific journals and magazines.
And it's here that he probably really began to learn about television for the first
time.
He was probably sitting up one night,
flipping through an issue of Science and Invention magazine,
when he came across a story about pictures that could fly through the air.
And this was a story that really captivated his imagination.
I'm trying to find out. Who is this? Anyone we know?
The two of us. It's the blind leading the blind here.
Now, in their 90s, Farnsworth's younger sisters have fond memories of their older
brother.
His mind was an inquiring mind,
and he wanted to know what made the world go round.
And that's why he became an inventor,
because he wanted to see what motivated him.
See what motivated, what made things move.
And so that's the kind of a person he was.
He would say things, and we just took his word for everything, didn't we, Laura?
Everything he said was right, was correct.
Because he said so.
Because Philo said so.
In 1921, two years before John Logie Baird had his moment of inspiration
on the cliff top near Hastings,
Farnsworth had a similar epiphany while working in a field.
Whoa! Whoa!
As he looked at the furrows he had just ploughed, he thought,
hang on, you could scan an image with electrons if they were in rows like that.
Genius.
And he was only 14 years old.
Farnsworth quickly fleshed out the details
and back at school covered his classroom blackboard with his diagrams and
equations.
And the teacher comes into the room at the end of the day
and sees this wild array of diagrams and formulas that he's written on the board,
and he says, what does this have to do with chemistry?
And Philo puts down his chalk and says,
this is my idea for electronic television.
And the teacher says, television? What's that?
And he says, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
And he says, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
Television? What's that?
What the boy genius drew was the first electronic camera tube.
Completely electronic television.
There were no spinning desks, no coffin ledges, no knitting needles.
But of the two systems, only one could survive.
And since Baird had actually produced and transmitted an image,
he was ahead. Things were looking good for the father of the thermal sock.
The cross was the breakthrough Baird needed. It proved his system worked.
His father was sufficiently impressed to fund him to the tune of 50 quid.
But Baird needed more than just money
and set about attracting some outside interest in his invention.
So, he advertised in The Times.
Seeing by wireless, inventor of apparatus wishes to hear from someone
who will assist, not financially, in making a working model.
He was lucky. His ad was noticed by Cinema Supremo, Will Day,
and with Day's sponsorship, Baird thought up ways to improve.
His machine.
What he decided is that his new machine needed more power.
A lot more. 2,000 volts, in fact.
So, he went out and bought himself hundreds and hundreds of batteries.
Now, bearing in mind his last experiment with electricity
had blotted out the Glasgow power supply, this was likely to end in tears.
And it did.
Baird's landlord wasn't at all impressed by the electrocution
and quickly evicted the singed Scott.
He had no money and things looked bleak.
But luckily, his sponsors stuck with him
and found him a little attic flat here at 22 Frith Street
in the middle of London's Soho.
Hi. Double espresso, please.
Today, the building's a café, which means it survived Baird's tenure.
But only just.
Although Baird had managed to get an image to appear on his rudimentary television,
there were still problems to overcome.
The mechanical, nip-off disc that scanned the image
had to be made bigger to get a brighter, clearer picture.
So, in his attic, Baird set about the task of making monstrous plywood discs
with enormous eight-inch lenses.
And at first, it looked like he was on to a winner.
Not one to give up, Baird had the bright idea
of studying the best lens he could find, the human eye.
He fooled the surgeon into thinking he was a fellow doctor
and took home a freshly removed eye.
Unfortunately, while Baird may have been a fine inventor,
he was a hopeless surgeon.
And the eye just went squish.
Fortunately for the Scot on the other side of the Atlantic,
the young American lad Farnsworth
hadn't got very far developing his idea either.
He was the eldest in the family, and when his father died in 1924,
he had to give up his education, put his television dream on hold
and find work to support the rest of the family.
While funds were faltered,
Baird was preparing to trial the latest version of his television.
But first, he needed some dummy to sit in front of his camera.
Now, this is a Stooky Bill.
It's actually a ventriloquist dummy's head
that Baird purchased off a market stall
to replace a human sitting in front of it,
because his original camera was so insensitive
that he poured more and more light onto the object he was televising
until he got to the point where he, on one occasion,
set fire to someone's hair.
So, here we have Stooky Bill sitting in front of a spinning disc.
In October 1925, with a final flurry of twisting knobs and crossing fingers,
Baird, at last, managed to get an image of the dummy's face on his television.
He was in shades of grey rather than just black and white,
and this was a major step forward.
But it wasn't enough for Baird.
He was determined to see a human face on the screen.
So, he grabbed the first person he could find,
and that person turned out to be a teenager called Bill Tainton.
Just stay here and look straight ahead, OK?
I was a bit scared of doing it,
but he assured me that everything was all right and nothing to worry about.
And then he disappeared to go down to the receiving end
to see if he could see a picture or something or other.
And I got into focus
and couldn't stop there much more in a minute
cos there's a terrific heat in these lamps.
And I pulled away.
You've moved a wee bit. You're out of focus.
You've got to keep very, very still.
With that, he put his hand in his pocket
and pressed half a crown in my hand.
So, that was the first television fee, half a crown?
That, you can say, was the first television fee in the world.
You should have got a better agent.
So, I was pleased with half a crown.
That's why I did all what Mr Baird asked me to do.
When he got back to receive, he shouted out...
Can you just stick your tongue out for me, please?
I couldn't make out what he was really up to.
So, I poked my tongue out,
and I thought he was rude at the time, mind you.
It's worked. I can see him.
This is a photograph of what he would have seen.
The first ever television transmission of a human face.
Well, he was still excited when he spoke to me,
and he said, what do you think of it, William?
So, I came out point blank and said, I don't think much of it.
Whatever Baird's living dummy might have thought
of the weird Scots mesmerising apparatus,
the man himself was ecstatic.
I can see you! Television at last!
Keen to show off his amazing invention as quickly as possible,
Baird invited selected members of the Royal Institution round to his flat.
And so, on January 26th, 1926,
the great and the good, dressed in full evening dress,
trudged up this dingy staircase to see what all the fuss was about.
Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming along
to my demonstration of telly-vision.
Baird was worried. Not that they wouldn't be impressed,
but that the lenses on the nit-cough disc might shake loose again,
massacring his guests.
All that happened, though, was that one man got his beard caught.
The audience managed to see the face of a person.
Although faint and blurred, it was transmitted from one room to the other.
Some thought this was trickery.
During his demonstration, Baird caught one suspicious man
crawling under the apparatus to find out how it was done.
Excuse me, sir, have you lost something down here?
Television had arrived.
Baird was on a high.
Instead of closeting himself away at lunchtime
with a scone and a cup of Presbyterian tea,
he was to be found charging around Soho,
gorging himself on peach and peacock.
This, to him, would have been an audeurve, an amuse-bouche.
There were fine wines washed down with lashings of hot brandy.
He was, without realising it, the original media-lovey.
Ironically, his favourite restaurant was the Ivy,
which today is the favourite haunt of all the stars that his invention created.
But over in the United States, the young pretender was closing in.
While Baird gorged his way through London's West End,
and altogether more sober Farnsworth had settled down in San Francisco,
the Utah farm boy, now aged 20, had set up a laboratory
and was once more working obsessively on his television system.
Though he had married, he remained faithful to his electronic mistress
and confessed to his wife,
I think you should know there's another woman in my life,
and her name is Television.
But his intellectual infidelity paid off.
In less than a year, Farnsworth had a device that actually displayed an image.
All of a sudden, Baird's mechanical system had an electronic rival.
Farnsworth got his first picture on this cathode ray tube.
It was a simple image of a straight line that appeared in a field
no bigger than a postage stamp on the face of this cathode ray tube
on September 7th, 1927,
and that was the breakthrough that he had been waiting for.
Back in Britain, Baird was under pressure.
He was forced to combine gluttony with designing,
using tablecloths in the restaurants he visited to work on improvements.
He must have looked like a paranoid fool
as he scuttled around with a sheaf of tablecloths under his arm.
John Logie Baird, however, was keen to convince the Americans
that he wasn't out of the picture.
And so, just two years after his first clumsy demonstration of television,
he scored another first.
He broadcast live pictures of a woman in London
across 3,000 miles of ocean
to a television set in New York.
In February 1928, Baird still ruled the TV roost,
but his reign was short-lived.
A few months later, Farnsworth launched his cathode ray tube system
in San Francisco, and the press went wild.
It was anyone's race, but neither of them won.
Big business saw just how enormous television might be.
In America, the giant RCA Corporation developed their very own
completely original electronic system, leaving Farnsworth out in the cold.
And in the UK, Marconi EMI were developing a similar electronic system,
leaving Baird out of the equation.
However, here Baird had an indulgent auntie.
Baird persuaded the BBC to let him use their radio transmitters
for his experimental broadcasts.
His television nan was no longer theory, he was actually transmitting.
It is now 12 years ago
since I produced the first little flickering television image.
Today we have in London a regular television service,
twice daily, with thousands of lookers in.
Baird became the first in the world to broadcast live television pictures,
and he marketed his Baird television like a true businessman.
This is the only surviving example of the world's first mass-produced television
set.
It was made in 1927. It's a Baird Model B televisor.
They were very, very expensive,
about the same price as buying a brand-new Rolls-Royce car.
In fact, they were so expensive that the Baird company rapidly had to rethink
and bring out a much cheaper model.
It's almost like a pair of video headphones. You actually watch it like this.
Early broadcasts were, quite frankly, rubbish,
because the sound and the picture weren't in sync.
So what you actually got was something like this.
I would talk to you for two minutes...
...and then the screen would go black, and then you'd hear what I'd just said.
Didn't matter, though. People were amazed.
Ah. So you've missed your train.
Yes. I got to the station, and there it was, just pulling out.
The first play ever broadcast was The Man With a Flower in His Mouth.
There were three characters.
All you could see was their head and shoulders,
and then they would slide in and out of a fixed studio chair
when the checkered board came across.
And you had to look really, really hard to see the picture.
A dozen, more or less. I'd have caught it.
The early 30-line television pictures from about 1929 onwards
were very small, only about half the size of a postcard.
They were dim, and because you were using a neon lamp,
they weren't black and white, they were orange and black.
Like most people, Ray Herbert, who was 12 at the time,
couldn't afford to buy a bad televisor.
So, he bought a kit of parts, and built one for himself and his parents.
And you had to crouch down as the person operating the system,
so that you could just see the bottom bit of the picture,
making the adjustments as necessary,
enabling your parents to look over your shoulder
and see the picture itself.
Well, it was a great occasion when I got my first picture in November.
And I summoned my father in, who thought I should be in bed at 11 o'clock,
instead of fiddling about with...
with television equipment.
And I said to him, there you are, that's television.
And he said, oh, are you sure?
Are you sure it's not a pattern of the wallpaper?
And I said, no, no, it's a television picture.
While the BBC were busying themselves
broadcasting plays about men with foliage in their mouths,
there was another broadcaster with a much clearer agenda.
How many lines?
The Nazis were quick to realise the potential of television
and became the world's first public service broadcaster.
And to make sure everyone got the message,
Nazi TV helpfully installed the hugely expensive sets in community centres.
With the uplifting material, it was like daytime television now,
only with Kilroy replaced by Hitler.
The Nazis were the first, but by no means the last,
to try and use the television as a tool to manipulate the masses.
Back in Blighty, where there were masses just longing to be manipulated,
the BBC finally decided it was time to get serious.
The trouble was, there were two systems, Baird's and Marconi's.
And as is the way with the Beeb, they went for both.
Here at Alexandra Palace in London, they built two studios.
To my right, one for the bantamweight Baird with his mechanical system.
And to my left, one for the heavyweight corporation Marconi EMI
with its Farnsworth-style electronic system.
And they took it in turns to broadcast one week Baird, one week Marconi EMI.
And then, after six months, whoever offered the best service would win...
the airwaves of Britain.
So, on November 2nd, 1936, BBC television was born.
They even wrote a special song to celebrate the new arrival.
Conjured up in sound and sight
By the magic rays of light
Now, with such gems as the UK's worst toilets,
you could be forgiven for thinking that modern TV has gone down the pan.
But trust me on this, it hasn't.
It used to be much, much worse.
You all right?
Yes, I'm quite well, thank you.
The 1930s was not TV's golden era.
I have not come here to be made a laughing stock.
There are pee-pees.
This is a carving by the young English sculptor Henry Moore.
I imagine that you could find your way alone in the dark.
Yes, I can.
But even if tap dancing and people in fezzes were your bag
and you decided to buy a TV, it wasn't easy.
So, the poor old viewer went into a big department store like Selfridges
and said, I want to buy a television set.
And the sales assistant would say, certainly.
Do you want a TV set?
And the sales assistant would say, certainly.
Do you want an EMI system or do you want to buy a Baird system?
And if you made the wrong choice, six months down the line,
you were left with a worthless piece of junk.
Nonetheless, the competition was underway
with an early lead for Marconi EMI,
whose picture quality was generally considered superior.
And then, disaster.
As Baird struggled to match Marconi's quality,
the old Crystal Palace were burnt down.
The dead-elevated chambers resembled nothing on Earth,
least of all the old Crystal Palace.
Baird's TV system and his dreams went up in smoke.
The fire was the end for Baird.
And the BBC never even bothered waiting for the end of the competition.
They simply handed the airwaves to Marconi EMI.
Baird was devastated.
Of course, were all the people who'd wasted such a vast amount of money
buying one of his television sets.
Now, cameras, please, here are the instructions.
We're using all three of you in this scene.
But people who'd bought the Marconi EMI system didn't fare well, either.
Because no sooner had the BBC started to develop their new thing,
it was brought to a grinding halt by the start of the Second World War.
Afraid the enemy bombers might use the TV signal to guide them,
the BBC stopped transmitting.
For five years, there truly was.
Nothing to watch on television.
August 8, 1940, and the battle for Britain is on.
30 enemy aircraft over the tunnel, flying due west.
However, little did the Luftwaffe know that they would soon be defeated.
Treated by television.
Picture the scene. It's 1940, and pretty well every day,
wave after wave of German bombers are flying over this very stretch
of Sussex coastline.
Now, we were outnumbered and outgunned.
We should have lost, but we had one critical advantage.
Thanks to the new invention of radar, we could see them coming.
Radar wouldn't have been possible without one vital ingredient
taken directly from television, the cathode ray tube.
Suddenly, scientists didn't need to listen to confusing radar signals.
They had a screen on which they could actually see the incoming aircraft.
Here comes the Luftwaffe.
In dozens of flights, hundreds of planes.
In the Battle of Britain, it armed our forces with the exact position
and distance of the enemy, and helped win the most decisive air battle of the war.
If it wasn't for radar, this program would probably be in German.
So, in 1940, television didn't change the world.
It did something much more important.
It stopped the world being changed.
So, in 1940, television didn't change the world.
It did something much more important.
It stopped the world being changed.
Hello, everybody.
This is the BBC television station at Alexandra Palace.
When the war was over, which, incidentally, we won,
television was the only way to stop the war.
When the war was over, which, incidentally, we won,
television really took off,
and 20,000 sets were sold in the UK in the first year.
The sets were cheaper and better,
and the rebirth of programming was perfectly timed.
Mips, on you, camera one.
It brought some light relief to the doom and gloom of post-war depression.
But, while television was back and booming,
the same couldn't be said of its inventors.
John Logie Baird died a broken man.
For 23 years, he'd nursed his invention,
bringing the world the first television pictures,
the first TV presenter, even the first transatlantic broadcast.
But Baird's system was fatal.
It was the first television show in the world
but Baird's system was fatally flawed.
Mechanical TV was never going to change the world.
In America, Farnsworth watched helpless
as the mega-corporation RCA claimed his invention as their own,
broadcasting to the masses and getting all the glory.
Deeply embittered, he gave up on television
and turned his brilliant mind to nuclear fusion,
until drinking got the better of him.
He didn't know when to stop.
An overactive mind that never slept.
He'd have some...
At night, sometimes he'd have to have something to put him to sleep.
He started taking a glass of wine
and then he'd have one or two glasses later on.
It's not a thing that we especially are proud of to say,
but the thing that took him in the end was alcohol.
It was a sad ending for the American genius
who took his inspiration from the land
and invented what you and I call television.
You know, I've worked in television for 15 years,
but I still have no idea how the actual set works.
I recognise that these are speakers
and that they have an important job to do,
and I presume all this has something to do with electricity.
But how that electricity gets down this bit,
which is the cathode ray tube,
and then makes a picture on the screen,
I'm completely clueless.
It's more unfathomable than an internal combustion engine.
And to think it was all dreamed up by a 14-year-old boy.
Farnsworth died sad and disillusioned.
He was buried in this graveyard in Provo, Utah.
But his spirit lives on, and these bikers from Salt Lake City
who all work in television are named after the man who invented it.
They're called Philo's Angels.
We're very interested in Philo T Farnsworth
because as the inventor of TV,
he created a business, a whole industry that we're all involved in.
We all love it. We have a great time working on it.
It's fantastic. And if it wasn't for Philo T Farnsworth,
I'd probably still be a bartender.
Television changed the world for most people
because they got to see things they never would have seen before,
like London, England, Paris, France.
Countries like Italy and many different inventions
that we would have never heard about for years.
Rest in peace.
I think without question, Philo deserves the inventor's title for television.
Here's an Idaho farm boy who put things together in his head
on a chalkboard with no real laboratory or formal training.
And he did it months, if not years, ahead of what everybody else did.
Yeah, he deserves it, I think.
Thank you, Philo. Appreciate you.
By the time Philo T Farnsworth died,
television was well on its way to becoming
the most powerful tool of mass communication on the planet.
Television was changing history.
For joint appearances, the subject of television
The most famous example of this was a televised debate in 1960
between would-be presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy.
Nixon looked tired and haggard.
While Kennedy looked like a young, vibrant Cary Grant.
This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country.
People listening to the debate on the radio
were convinced Nixon was the better man,
but on TV, it was Kennedy who won.
And it was TV that mattered.
So, if television had never been invented,
Nixon may very well have won that election.
And if he'd won it, he'd have been in the hot seat
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Once again, then, television stopped the world being changed.
If Nixon had started a nuclear war over Cuba,
then I'm sure it would have been the most exciting television programme
of all time, and possibly the shortest.
The power of television images speak for themselves.
A picture really is worth a thousand words.
Imagine if the moon landing had never been televised.
No-one would ever have believed that Armstrong had taken
that giant leap for mankind.
Make that out.
Contact light.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
I'm standing on top of the Berlin Wall,
which for years has been the most potent symbol of the division of Europe.
And there can be few better illustrations of the changes
which are sweeping across this continent
than the party which is taking place here on top of it tonight.
And television doesn't just record events, it can change them.
If it weren't for television, the Berlin Wall may never have fallen.
That collapse of the Berlin Wall came about
because people in East Berlin could watch West German television.
It was in their language, it was all about them,
and although they were never allowed to go there,
they could see what life was like on the other side of the wall.
And they wanted to be part of it, and it created an enormous strength
of feeling on the part of East Germans
that they shouldn't be treated differently, they shouldn't live one life,
while people are exactly the same, a few hundred yards away,
lived another life.
And television created the pressure,
it showed them when to move, and it showed them what had happened.
And it really was a moment in which television impacted
on every part of the process.
Television has had some really powerful moments,
but I don't think anything matches the impact of what happened
and what was seen and broadcast from New York City on September the 11th
when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were destroyed
and seen being destroyed on live TV by tens, hundreds of millions,
as far as I know, of people around the world.
Imagine if the World Trade Centre collapse hadn't been televised.
Would its impact have been so big?
The fact that it was broadcast, the fact that so many people saw it,
I think magnified its power many times,
and, well, just look at the world around us now
and we can see the consequences of September the 11th.