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WHEN TELEVISION STOPPED: 1939-46 BY

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JONATHAN BIGNELL
Nov 12, 2021 | Blogs | 0 ! AGAINST POLITICAL OSTRICH-ISM:
CAN LOCAL TELEVISION AMPLIFY
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WHEN TELEVISION STOPPED: 1939-

Anniversary celebrations are being planned to mark the start of BBC radio in 1922 and 46 by Jonathan Bignell November 12,
Channel 4 TV in 1982 next year, as John
John
JohnEllis’s
Ellis’s
Ellis’sblog
blog
blog last week discussed. But rather than 2021

celebrating a beginning, I thought I would look at the time when television stopped,
after a mere three years of existence, during the Second World War. There was wartime CfP: JAFP special issue “Making
television in Germany and France[1]
[1]
[1] but not in Britain, and I think its absence tells us a Monsters: The Production of Terror”.
Deadline: Nov 30, 2021. November 12,
lot about how broadcasting worked here.
2021

Peacetime television was an extension of the BBC’s national radio broadcasting and in
CfP: edited collection “Cinema and
1936, after years of test transmissions, the BBC began a daily television service using
Media Cultures in the Middle East”.
John Logie Baird’s technology and also a competing system developed by Marconi, Deadline: Nov 15, 2021. November 7,
another British company.[2]
[2]
[2] Television was demonstrated in department stores and 2021
exhibitions, and although hardly anyone owned a TV set, many thousands had seen
one at a public event and expected that the medium would become politically and 2022: THE YEAR OF BRITISH
culturally important. BROADCASTING ANNIVERSARIES by
John Ellis November 5, 2021

The early television receivers cost about £85, a!ordable only by the wealthy, so
although prices had fallen to about £30 by 1939 this was still six weeks’ salary for the REPEAT TELEVISION: TALKING
average worker and there were only about 20,000 sets in use.[3]
[3]
[3] On the other hand, PICTURES CHANNEL AND FREEVIEW
by Kenneth Longden November 5, 2021
during wartime watching television could have seemed like an ideal way to spend the
long evenings isolated in dark, blacked-out rooms. For one thing, the relatively weak
pictures on the small early sets would have been easier to see! But there was concern TO BE (DIS)CONTINUED?: SERIES
VERSUS SERIAL TV by Richard Hewett
that television signals might be used for enemy bombers’ navigation, because the sole
November 5, 2021
transmitter aerial was located on the top of a hill (to maximise its range) at Alexandra
Park in inner London and was thus a potential homing beacon.[4]
[4]
[4] Moreover, television
news pictures of bomb damage might give useful feedback to the enemy on the
CATEGORIES
success or failure of German air raids.

It was clear before the war, however, that broadcasting would be crucial for Select Category
disseminating news and emergency instructions, and for maintaining morale. These
were the roles that radio played instead of TV, nationally and also internationally.
Britain could broadcast radio to its Empire as well as within the nation, creating an
ARCHIVES
imagined community, “a deep, horizontal, comradeship”.[5]
[5]
[5] The metropolitan, relatively
elite form of 1930s British television was in tension with the discourses of national unity
Select Month
and inclusiveness that the outbreak of war validated.

So, what did the television sta! do in the war? A Broadcasting Committee was created
by Government in 1935 to plan for war, and BBC sta!, tasked with creating and
maintaining technical infrastructure, dropped television to free up resources.[6]
[6]
[6] The
Alexandra Palace transmission equipment was used to jam German air navigation, and
BBC television technicians worked on new Very High Frequency (VHF) equipment for
the RAF’s GEE navigational system. BBC scientists installed new oscillator drives in 1938
to enable synchronised radio transmission from the sixteen transmitters around
Britain, creating a single national radio channel, and the BBC set up new radio channels
for the Empire, occupied countries and Allied military personnel. These were national
and international publics that television could not reach.

In mid-1939 the British Army comprised 224,000 troops plus 320,000 Territorials but by
1944 this had risen to 4.5 million including 350,000 women.[7]
[7]
[7] Another 3.25 million
people worked in war industries and 350,000 more in full-time civil defence. Collective
listening to radio was important for military morale and maintaining concentration
during long periods of shift work, whereas private domestic viewing had characterised
British television.[8]
[8]
[8] Public desires for visual pleasure were satis"ed not by television
but by magazines like Picture Post and by cinema.

On the day war broke out, there should have been TV programmes from 11.00 to 12.00,
then 3.00 to 5.00 pm, and then in the evening from 8.00 pm until about 11.00 pm.[9]
[9]
[9]
The daytime schedule was aimed at women and children, and included light music from
Mantovani and his orchestra, Mickey Mouse cartoons and a live visit to Regent’s Park
Zoo. The evening was to include entertainment in Variety, a talk called Practical
Household Suggestions, a "lm newsreel and a performance by the BBC Television
Orchestra. But at 10.00 am Douglas Birkinshaw, the senior engineer at Alexandra
Palace, received a telephone call from the Director of Television telling him to close
down at noon. Far from getting into a panic, the sta! transmitted Come and be Televised
from the Olympia exhibition hall, in which interviewer Elizabeth Cowell talked to people
visiting the event. Two women discussed their love of outdoor swimming, Australian
and West Indian visitors gave their impressions of Britain, and there were short
performances by people who had brought along a ukulele and violin. The live show ran
late, and eventually the cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premiere was broadcast until 12.15,
followed by test transmissions for viewers to calibrate their receivers. Television came
to a stop calmly and would restart nearly seven years later with the BBC presenter,
Jasmine Bligh, saying brightly: “Good afternoon, everybody. How are you? Do you
remember me?”

Fig. 1: Anti-submarine radar in the nose of an RAF Wellington

Radio, television and radar were variations on the same principles and each reached
maturity in the late 1930s. Experts knew the military potential of radio waves to create
television images of enemy positions, unobstructed by weather and over long
distances. It would be much better than photographing enemy emplacements using
cameras mounted on aircraft (as in the First World War). In 1924, Baird had published
an article that mentioned “radio vision”, using re#ected waves to register an object.[10]
[10]
[10]
In wartime this became a radar technique used by RAF bombers to image the terrain
beneath them and thus recognise their targets.[11]
[11]
[11] The electronics companies that
made television receivers transferred to war production, making military radar screens.
Baird Television Ltd. eventually produced 110,000 of them.[12]
[12]
[12] In a way, British
television did continue during the Second World War, but in the form of radar imaging
rather than broadcast programmes.

Fig. 2: A WAAF radar operator

A Committee for the Scienti"c Survey of Air Defence investigated rumours that
Germany had an invisible Death Ray that could destroy our aircraft, and although
Robert Watson-Watt, head of the Radio Research Laboratory, rejected the idea he did
know that radio waves might re#ect from and thus identify attacking bombers. Watson-
Watt had been an advisor to Baird Television Ltd., because of his expertise in cathode
ray tubes, and he had demonstrated radar as early as February 1935.[13]
[13]
[13] Using TV
signals broadcast from the BBC’s Daventry transmitter, he showed that they were
re#ected o! an RAF bomber, making a visible trace on a cathode ray screen. Watson-
Watt’s team began a top-secret project using modi"ed Marconi television sets and
achieved radar detection of aircraft at 60 miles range. The Government "nanced Chain
Home, a network of radar stations on the east coast based on designs by Baird
Television, that could detect aircraft 200 miles away.[14]
[14]
[14] Signals were tracked on huge
maps by sta! from the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, so that "ghter aircraft could defend
English cities. After the war the radar towers were almost all demolished, though one
was used for test transmissions of colour TV in 1964.

Fig. 3: Mapping enemy aircraft from radar signals

The sinking of ships bringing food and raw materials to Britain gave urgency to the
development of air-to-sea radar to detect U-boats. There was also an arms race
between Britain and Germany in air-to-air radar. German night "ghters had on-board
radar to intercept British bombers, while British Mosquito night "ghters used detectors
that could hunt German opponents by tracking their radar transmissions.

The BBC entered the war with a sta! of 4,233 and 23 radio transmitters, which had
grown by 1945 to a sta! of 11,417 and 138 transmitters.[15]
[15]
[15] The Hankey Committee,
meeting in 1943, recommended the continuation of television as part of the BBC’s
monopoly and Britain’s television service resumed in London in June 1946. The main
spur was the need to grow the economy by enlarging the market for television sets, as
consumer goods came back into production.

After the discovery of electromagnetic waves at the end of the 19th century, the
evolutionary paths of radio, TV and radar were by no means determined. In the Second
World War both civilian and military uses of radio thrived, while television was relatively
marginal and mutated instead into its sister technology, radar. The wartime seas and
skies were busy with variations of o!ensive and defensive transmission systems and
screens deriving from television technology.

Jonathan
Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading. He
JonathanBignell
Bignell
got interested in radar’s relationship with TV after holidaying in a converted WW2 RAF
radar station on the Welsh coast this summer, and a much longer and more detailed
essay on the topic will appear as J. Bignell, ‘The Absence of Television: Broadcasting and
the Outbreak of War in Britain, 1939-40’, in Renee Dickason (ed.), Issues and Singularity
in the British Media (Paris: Atlande, 2022). Jonathan works on histories of television
drama, cinema and children’s media. Some of his work is available free online from
his university
university
universityweb
web
webpage
page
page or from his academia.edu
academia.edu
academia.edu page.

REFERENCES
[1]
[1]
[1] Truckendanner, Petra, “Paris during the Nazi Occupation: Nazi Propaganda from the
Ei!el Tower”, Spiegel
Spiegel
SpiegelOnline
Online
Online, 3 December 2014.

[2]
[2]
[2] Hickethier, Knut, “Early TV: Imagining and Realising Television”, in Jonathan Bignell
and Andreas Fickers (eds), A European Television History (New York: Wiley-Blackwell,
2008), pp. 62-4.

[3]
[3]
[3] Emmerson, Andrew, Old Television (Oxford: Shire, 2009), p. 10.

[4]
[4]
[4] Gorham, Maurice, Broadcasting and Television since 1900 (London: Andrew Dakers,
1952), pp. 160-1.

[5]
[5]
[5] Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Re!ections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalisms (London: Verso, 1983), p.16.

[6]
[6]
[6] Gorham, pp. 142-4.

[7]
[7]
[7] Brown, Mike, Wartime Britain, 1939-45 (Oxford: Shire, 2011), p. 30.

[8]
[8]
[8] Street, Sean, A Concise History of Radio (Tiverton: Kelly, 2002), pp. 73-4.

[9]
[9]
[9] Graham, Russ J., “The Edit that Rewrote History”, Transdi"usion
Transdi"usion
Transdi"usion, 31 October 2005.

[10]
[10]
[10] Baird, John Logie, “An Account of some Experiments in Television”, Wireless World
and Radio Review, 7 May 1924, pp. 153-5.

[11]
[11]
[11] Baird, Malcolm, Douglas Brown and Peter Waddell, “Television, Radar and J.L.
Baird”, Newsletter
Newsletter
Newsletterof
of
ofthe
the
theNarrow
Narrow
NarrowBandwidth
Bandwidth
BandwidthTelevision
Television
TelevisionAssociation
Association
Association, September 2005.

[12]
[12]
[12] Hills, Adrian, “Baird Television Ltd. and Radar”, BairdTelevision.com
BairdTelevision.com
BairdTelevision.com, undated.

[13]
[13]
[13] Baird, Brown and Waddell.

[14]
[14]
[14] Anon., “Scannings and Re#ections: Television and Aircraft Detection”, Television
Television
Televisionand
and
and
Short
Short
ShortWave
Wave
WaveWorld
World
World, September 1938, p. 35.

[15]
[15]
[15] Gorham, p. 213.

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