Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Ally Pally birthplace of TV project on hold - but is there a silver lining?
Mind you, I am not criticizing the present council which has been supportive of the restoration, unlike previous administrations (I'm thinking of you, Lord Toby Harris) which simply wished to flog AP off. No, the real villains are the philistine art-history trained English Heritage/Historic England "experts" which egged on the the costly, unnecessary and in conservation terms, vandalistic planned demolition of the converted arches which literally forms the two studio walls .. to appease some local Muswell Hill nimbies who have always hated the building, and wished to tidy away the BBC changes to some impossible Victorian appearance.
The silver lining is that there is now a bit of time to for conservatonists to try to persuade the Council/AP to rethink
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Finsbury Park Ranger on
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... is this coming from the person arguing over who first started sending TV signals? I'm just interested in local history that's all.
Good luck to the Germans today, they do alot right.
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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Touché lol
But I didn't write that it wasn't true. Made up nonsense to get money pumped into one of the ugliest victorian buildings in North London.
For what's it's worth, Ally Pally would have been a great site for the new THFC Stadium. The frontage could have been kept to keep the skyline image and the rest of the place bulldozed. The place has been a white elephant since day 1 in 1873 and that's the reason the BBC found a cheap place to build their TV studios.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Here's a show from last year - still viewable on iPlayer for those interested: bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0817s4g/televisions-opening-night-how-th.... Seems quite difficult to put the achievement in context - the first live TV broadcast having been made by John Logie Baird in 1925 - what took them so long?
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Permalink Reply by Straw Cat on
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Perhaps it was
- Baird's adherence to a mechanical/chemical rather than solid-state electronic solution
- John Reith's opposition (perhaps foreseeing the horrors of Big Brother reality TV etc)
- Persuading the government and public that television was the future
But HG Wells' film Things to Come coming out in 1936, showing Britains's future inhabitants using lovely large flat iMac-style TVs, may have helped move things on!
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Like who knows it Colin? It's either television or it isn't.
Are you talking about the sets, then that has nought to do with Ally Pally. Or are you talking about the technology that gets the signal to them? Then it's Germany. In either case nothing to do with Ally Pally apart from the fact the BBC had it's first Studio there. So how about the title 'The first BBC TV studio (in the world) ? lol
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Permalink Reply by Colin Marr on
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Oh dear, I hadn’t expected this forum to be a place for such assertive nationalism, British or German. When I used the expression “television as we know it”, I thought it would be sufficiently clear to mean television broadcast to the masses for their enjoyment in their homes, which is what most of us now know it to be.
There is more to explain about why it took until 1936 for this service first to be established from Ally Pally – an event and location to be celebrated in European and world terms. More anon.
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Just to clear up some facts:
The BBC chose Alexandra Palace as the site for its first TV broadcasts because it was on high ground over north London so that reception could be over a wide and highly populated area. This choice was not because Ally Pally was a cheap place to build a studio! In fact, the modifications the BBC carried out were relatively lavish and surprisingly sensitive to the Victorian architecture, which was decidedly out of fashion in the 1930s.
The BBC built more than studios – it was an entire ‘TV Station’, complete with a Transmitter Hall, equipment rooms, dressing rooms, offices, and the iconic transmitter tower and antenna. In the pioneering times of 1936 the technology required these aspects to be closely located.
Although television, defined as the process of transmitting images over distance, has been demonstrated in the 1920s by Logie Baird and other pioneers, these early transmissions used electro-mechanical technology. The Baird system had achieved some remarkable successes but by 1935 -36 had reached its limits. The first transmissions from Alexandra Palace were to trial the Baird system against the new fully electronic system developed by EMI and Marconi.
It was the combination of the Marconi company’s broadcasting expertise and EMI’s innovative use of new fully-electronic technology that won the day at Ally Pally. It is now recognised that EMI at Hayes had put together a ‘dream team’ of scientists and engineers, including some of the best physicists and mathematicians from Cambridge to work on this leading edge project. Two of the key members of this team were Isaac Schoenberg and Alan Blumlein - names that are distinctly European rather than British!
The real achievement in 1936 was that there was sufficient confidence in the chosen technology for the BBC to commit to a regular broadcast television service. What we should be celebrating and commemorating at Ally Pally is this triumph of science, engineering and management to bring it all together. Hopefully, a new scheme for the TV Studios/ Station at Ally Pally will become a reality.
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>>Hopefully, a new scheme for the TV Studios/ Station at Ally Pally will become a reality.
I totally support dedicated local people in their aim to promote those things they care about, so I hope the Ally Pally Society wins the day.
Maybe the difficulty that has caused current plans to be abandoned has been connected with the view implicit in the plans that the BBC laudable for its technological 'first'?
Not enough people are interested I guess- even if, say, Apple were to start a studio commemorating the iPhone where you could find out how it used to work and how it was networked in, most people would glaze over at that prospect, wouldn't they?
The BBC is a state-sponsored org mainly funded by a compulsory nationwide levy, so when it comes to commercial matters they've always had an unfair advantage. The tech was out of their hands, as you note - they invented nothing. Their part was having the 'vision' to commission in the teeth, apparently, of opposition from their boss and founder, a noble Lord.
The tenuous claim to a 'first', then is maybe not interesting enough - that might be why funding has been hard to obtain when there are many other calls on the cash. Maybe as a community, we've moved on from the ritual celebration of the 'institution' so many of them having been found to have been so corrupt.
I recall that at one point the BBC did a feasibility study on moving to Ally Pally - now that would have been interesting - if the studios had a beating 'heart' made out of old stuff. Perhaps the BBC should fund a studio there today? Maybe even further develop John Logie Baird's 'flying spot' into a ray-traced VR 'Imaginarium' - the sort of thing that might interest local resident Andy Serkis.
Much as I like tech and want well-run museums full of 'originals' I can play with, is not the real interest in how the tech was deployed as mass communication, with it's Orwellian overtones? MI5 are still on permanent duty in the BBC newsrooms with the power to suppress any part of any transmission, aren't they? The BBC's own self-censorship is riven throughout the org, isn't it?
Now we have more choice, why has TV diminished? Has the tech changed 'lean back' TV into 'lean forward' internet or were the people always keen to avoid being imposed upon? Can the cumulative nature of tech help TV re-orient or will we never again pretty much all share the same experience? What's the point of state broadcasting nowadays anyway?
If the mothballed studios can point to possible futures by drawing objectively on what happened in a way that the majority appreciate, that's maybe worth state support, isn't it?
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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MI5 are still on permanent duty in the BBC newsrooms with the power to suppress any part of any transmission, aren't they?
Having worked in several BBC newsrooms I can answer this.
NO !
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Thanks John - good to know! Of course, just because you didn't see them yourself...
If you ran MI5, how would you ensure that live broadcasting of news items that threaten national security are not transmitted by the state broadcaster without prior clearance by GCHQ then?
So they didn't get a film about the Hornsey College of Art occupation canned then?
www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/mi5.bbc.page9_obs_18aug1985...
etc etc.
There isn't much hard evidence, but things like the emergence of facts about the near coup against Harold Wilson during his premiership show how dangerous MI5 could be. What would have happened had they succeeded in replacing him with their nominee? Would we know about it?
I'm guessing that the censorship of the BBC by MI5 is a lot more draconian than people realise. It certainly was during the Falklands war. They successfully argued it was essential to protect our warmongering - the reporter was allowed to count British war planes, but not to say how many he had counted, remember?
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MI5 are still on permanent duty in the BBC newsrooms with the power to suppress any part of any transmission, aren't they?
No, the MI5 function was to vet applicants for jobs in the BBC News and Current Affairs departments to ensure that the balance of the news reporting was not hijacked by people with extreme views. They did not control news output on a story-by-story basis as you allege.
That vetting ceased with the end of the Cold War in 1992.
As a side issue, don't you think that the Argentinians were equally, if not more, guilty of warmongering ?
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A little more clarification:
The approved plans for the studios were not abandoned because of any perceived deficiencies in the plans – it was simply that the scheme ran out of budget and choices had to be made as to which parts of the scheme to chop. The decision was to continue with the Theatre and put the studios on hold.
Also to say, the plans for the studio spaces were not that it would be a museum! It was argued that a conventional museum would be a limited visitor attraction and something much more appealing was called for in these otherwise blank studio spaces. I don’t think anybody wanted it to be just a glorification of the BBC. The idea was to tell the story of what happened there in 1936 using audio-visual multimedia stuff and then move on to dazzle visitors with displays of contemporary digital media and new technology.
Hopefully, a new plan will successfully address the need to tell the Ally Pally story of innovation in the past, in a way that doesn’t dumb it down, and then link this to a view of the future and what new innovations might offer.
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