Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
TODAY, 2nd November: Baird, bids and bastardising
TODAY – 2nd November – is the 78th anniversary of the beginning of regular, "high definition" public television broadcasting, up on the hill at Alexandra Palace. Today, Scots (BBC Scotland) remember one of their most famous engineers. However our local council's remembrance takes a different form.
Despite the fact our council is the Trustee for the Charitable Trust that owns the building, it's not remembered today, which ommission isn't especially important. However:
The council is currently firming up plans that would involve removing some of the remaining features of the Baird Studio, permanently. Changes that have been described as the permanent destruction of the front of the Studios.
Some of what's proposed would preclude a partial restoration of Baird's Intermediate Film Technique and probably, preclude any hope of UN World Heritage (a goal formally adopted by the Trust Board). The choices made over the priceless studio wing are, IMO, regrettable.
The bulk of the c. £20,000,000, Heritage Lottery-funded refurbishment of the east wing is to be welcomed, Although in today's Observer, one writer expresses timely concerns over the general theme over 20 years of HLF-funded projects – comments that are relevant close to home.
The buildings that won the national lottery jackpot – the hits and misses: article Guardian/Observer:
"At its worst, it favoured form over content and inflated box-ticking pieties into multimillion-pound structures. It expanded the apparatus of state-financed consultancy and over-management. It sometimes promoted phony populism and cultural cowardice. But would we rather it hadn’t happened, that there had been no revival in public works? No, we wouldn’t."
Clive Carter
Haringey Councillor
Tags for Forum Posts: Baird, Fund, HLF, Heritage, Lottery, Studios
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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I'm not sure that the Baird intermediate film technique is worthy of celebration, being, like most of Baird's work, a bodge and a complete dead end. The EMI/Marconi system, however, was a triumph of innovation and development and that deserves full public recognition. The only contribution that Baird made to television was to generate public interest and demand for a service.
Whoever is in charge of any restoration will have to be careful. There is a group currently engaged in refurbishing an ex-BBC transmitter and they hope to have it installed at AP. But this type of transmitter was never used at AP and would be an anachronism if displayed there.
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Permalink Reply by Colin Marr on
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Yes, let’s celebrate the success of EMI-Marconi in pioneering a fully electronic TV system, which proved to be the enduring successful technology. But Logie Baird was also responsible for ‘telecine’ as a way to scan filmed images into electronic form, which was an essential adjunct for the broadcasting of all film material from the late 1930s through to the 1970s and beyond, and is still in use today. The Ally Pally studios were the birthplace of telecine too.
The important thing now is to make sure that the current HLF funded project does justice to what actually happened at Ally Pally all those years ago.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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John, the whole proposed attraction is a celebration of the achievements of the BBC and of television at Ally Pally. The proposed contents do this and most of it is imaginative, with perhaps too great an emphasis on digital wizardry that could soon become passé.
Baird's contribution was indeed to generate public interest and demand for a service, but those were not small things. And as Colin Marr points out, Telecine – far superior to anything else – was his lasting technical contribution.
That Baird's Intermediate Film Technique became a "dead end" is almost entirely the point!
Historically it's of great importance, because it marked the end of one approach to the development of transmitted, moving images. An approach that had begun and been promoted by Baird and others for years.
John Logie Baird's company, as explained to me by his grandson, was closely allied to the British film industry. His hybrid system involved a regular 1930s movie camera (the Vinten) and rapid film development. While underwater (!) the exposed film was scanned and the signal then broadcast: all within a minute.
The system involved film, mechanics, chemicals and water. It was clumsy, immobile, unreliable and dangerous for the cameraman. As well as the explosive chemicals by him, he was often standing in a pool of water with electric cables running over it.
From a 21st century perspective, it was far more than a bodge: it shows how technology develops and fits and starts and yes, it was a classic dead end.
Between November 1936 and February 1937, transmitting by this method alternated weekly, with the system next door in Studio A: the EMI/Marconi system: three, mobile, independent cameras. All electronic. The future: in 1936.
But because the EMITron cameras are so immediately recognisable, even today, as a studio camera, it makes Baird's IFT system all the more bonkers, ingenious, remarkable and fascinating.
If a life-size replica could be made, it would be the only model in its original place, if space wre kept to house itl. Visitors would probably expect to see at least something even slightly original tangible, in situ.
And be delighted to see something that really happened that was Steam-punk-like!
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Permalink Reply by Straw Cat on
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Both Logie Baird’s foresight in seeing the potential of transmitted vision, and EMI-Marconi’s leap ahead with a solid-state, 405-line system, came to fruition behind the bricked-up arcades. Apart from the mast, those arches which formed the studios remain the most visible embodiment of how AP went electronic. Unfortunately Haringey's "consultation" for this nationally-important building was, as usual since they took over trusteeship in 1980, confined to an area around the Palace, as if AP were just another Haringey-owned property. Many NIMBYs in Muswell Hill hate the bricked-up loggia (actually many of them hate the whole Palace and would like it knocked down), and successfully lobbied for the bricks to be removed in the proposed project – thus defeating one of the main purposes, to preserve and celebrate the original two studios formed by them. As people a bit further afield than Muswell Hill are realizing this, opposition is growing, which hopefully will be taken notice of – if not by Haringey, then at the HLF.
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