大象传媒

鈥淭his story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Terry Cleaver of 大象传媒 Kent and has been added to the website on behalf of Mr Kenneth Metcalfe with his permission and they fully understand the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.鈥�

In 1939 I was ten years old and living in Sidcup. By 1943 I had a place at S.E.L Technology College and had to travel each day on two buses or a bus and a train with school bag, steel helmet and gas mask each way. Never once by car.

My parents took the view that if a bomb was going to fall on us, being in the garden air raid shelter, would give us little protection. So they slept upstairs in bed, ignoring bombs and anti aircraft gun fire, which was very loud. My two younger brothers were evacuated.
Sleeping on my own in the Anderson shelter had no comforts and often the ground shook. To take my mind off the external turmoil I would daydream, actual sleep was difficult.
I had heard of television but could not imagine what a TV picture could possibly look like. Very few people had ever seen a working set. It was difficult to anticipate, what did I expect? More to the point, would I ever see one working? Poor optics, virtual blurry images? Few children in today鈥檚 world can share that situation.

Then in 1946 at South East London technical college, the radio master constructed a working TV set. My first picture was a cricket match 鈥� with sound 鈥� in colour 鈥� yes, green, as the six inch tube was an ex radar VCR 97 Tube.

Within a year I built a set of my own, from construction details in practical television. Later my girlfriend (now my wife) and her family watched the Queen鈥檚 coronation on it (in green of course) while I was with the outside broadcast unit on the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace.
In 1951 I had joined the Post Office Television Outside Broadcast Group, providing vision circuits for 大象传媒 OB鈥檚. At that time 大象传媒 OB鈥檚 were based in the Palace of Arts, Wembley.
I moved to ATV when ITV started and later went to LWT retiring in 1989. That was not the end. Freelance work kept me working part time until 2002. Fifty-one years of television broadcasting that had started in an air raid shelter.

I spent a year of my National Service, all of 1949, at RAF Habbaniya, fifty five miles from Baghdad on the river Euphrates.

Ken Metcalfe

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