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
-
Permalink Reply by Straw Cat on
-
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!
-
Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
-
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
-
Permalink Reply by Colin Marr on
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
-
>>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?
-
Permalink Reply by John D on
-
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 !
-
-
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?
-
-
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 ?
-
-
-
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.
-
-
Nothing to do with assertive nationalism.. All your examples below are British.. so who's being nationalist? So only TV delivered to homes can be the first.. although others were running TV studios prior to the BBC.. I think it's called selective revisionism..
TV is/was a worldwide phenomemon and just to mention another point, sadly the BBC has become pretty rubbish these days, regardless of the 289m doled out to it. Once it was a news organisation, these days it mostly tries and fails to set the news agenda.
-
-
Thread limit reached, so re-posting here. John Dwrote:
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?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By any objective measure, we have always been involved in more armed conflicts that almost any other nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_England), far, far in excess of Argentina - that war cemented Thatcher's reign. We've been in lots of wars all my life, and yours, currently spending about £50bn annually - isn't that obscene?
During the Falklands War, the BBC seemed to me personally to be heavily and obviously censored - it must have been MI5 (based in the newsrooms) doing it as the tech didn't permit the remote censorship active now.
At its inception the Beeb did adopt Reith's strategy of 'autocensure' but were nonetheless unable to escape direct MI5 control, as you acknowledge. The dangers the Government saw in workers succeeding in their aims via the 1936 General Strike was probably the biggest motive to formalise the role of the BBC as a government-controlled propaganda arm, a role they have never been able to relinquish - why, having made it work in their favour, would the government give up its control of the state broadcaster?
Lots of work was done after WWII to establish exactly how the Nazis managed to manipulate the public and perpetrate a holocaust in plain sight. Out of those genocidal ashes, lessons were drawn by the victors and applied to mutate the government war apparatus even as we 'lost the peace'.
The Americans didn't like the word 'propaganda' so came up with 'public relations', nudging people's aspirations by 'hidden persuasion' towards a consumerism that could be satisfied by existing surplus capacity. So the factories previously producing machines of war were turned over to consumer goods and the state and media conspired to make us 'wage slaves' whose job extended to more than a decade per life of 'awake time' in front of the BBC's 'goggle' box.
As you wrote, by the end of the cold war (nearly sixty years later in the 1990's) one thing we now know for sure is that around three-quarters of all BBC staff were positively vetted, in total secrecy with careers ruined for no good reason, often as the result of errors and spurious caution. And that's what we know - what else went on? Any org that obliges staff to sign the Offical Secrets Act cannot be said to be free of government control - are senior newsroom staff required to sign the Act today?
I don't think it is a particularly 'British' type of censorship, but doubtless, it is subtle, not blindingly obvious, not easily ascertained when the 'old boys network' is still so strong - almost entirely white, middle-aged men pulling strings.
The BBC acts as censor and goes hand in hand with government wishes - this approach is so embedded in our lives that the BBC have become a part of how we are governed. Caversham was a vital global spying arm during WWII - why wouldn't that BBC effort continue today, in such an uncertain world? The Beeb constantly hammers home 'opinions', edited by senior staff on every aspect of world affairs - how do you separate out the propaganda when, for instance, there are often stories before and during Government announcements of new controls that cannot be accidentally complimentary?
-
-
I think the BBC works first and foremost for its government paymaster, then, secondarily, for it's audience. The government will make good on loud, frequent threats to withdraw the huge BBC subsidy otherwise.
The token anti-government stuff seems merely a sop - it's what I would do, put it about that 'both sides complain we are biased, so we're doing our job', then allow a bit of anti-government stuff through to back up the claim. Who better to propagandise than the chief propagandist?
Don't get me started on the 'BBC World Service', a station with global reach, not intended for licence-payers. Surely it's funded by Government for a reason?
Ask GCHQ and they'll say we are very much at war today. The erosion of 'fundamental' freedoms in this past decade I find breathtaking, yet almost no dissent is aired. The price of access to the richest communication medium ever known (the internet) seems to be, ironically, less freedom.
We can all see increasing parts of London have permanent automatic number-plate recognition cameras (https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1pZtbQyUOWIkUUn9-5uM6t...). You and I would probably have agreed that this Orwellian situation could not happen in modern times without outrage but Big Brother has arrived in force and nobody, especially the BBC, appear to consider mass observation even worthy of mention.
There seems to be a revolving door between GCHQ and the Beeb - they share the same values of benign dictatorship, don't they? They know what's best for us and our lawmakers agree that we need to sacrifice hard-won freedoms, leading to another contentious claim - that we are the most regulated first-world country.
The MI5 'internal' censorship of the BBC cannot have stopped in the 1990's, can it? Was recent news of the mass surveillance by GCHQ, highlighted by Snowden, not fuelled by the tradition the BBC established of secret co-operation between these 'powers' and the regular exchange of expertise? They're synergistic, aren't they? If I were running GCHQ, I'd certainly pressgang BBC staff and resources. We know for sure that weak, outdated laws are constantly flouted by MI5 after the fact, why not before it is reported?
During the Falklands I felt this going to another level - news of the anti-war campaigns was heavily suppressed etc, 'in the National Interest'. The broadcast justification was clear - if you are not 'with us' you are 'against us'. Very UKIP. The BBC willingly participated in a mass ban on facts being published, and doubtless, through Caversham etc, helped impose the ban elsewhere themselves - that was policed by MI5 staff inside newsrooms but nowadays it can be done remotely and more silently.
The BBC seem to enthusiastically participate (loving this ultimate expression of govt paternalism in which they revel) in a mass ban on anything broadcast that would fundamentally undermine our government - that would be treason, wouldn't it? Nowadays the policing of the BBC by MI5 can be done remotely and more silently, so why wouldn't they?
Abuse of power comes as no surprise.
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next ›
© 2024 Created by Hugh.
Powered by
