Image: On 27 August the 大象传媒 televised the celebrations of the Centenary of the laying of the Submarine Cable between England and France. For the first time in history a programme was transmitted across the Channel, when viewers saw the town of Calais en fete, with a torchlight procession, dancing in the square and a firework display. Hassan Abd-El-Rehim, the egyptian Channel swimmer, is greeted by M. Gasron Bertha, Mayor of Calais, on the platform outside the town hall. Richard Dimbleby and Alan Adair gave commentaries on the festivities and interviewed local personalities in the front of the cameras, August 1950.
With the expansion of the television network across the United Kingdom well under way by the end of the 1940s, the thoughts of some at the 大象传媒 began to turn towards challenges further afield. Percolating in the mind of the 大象传媒鈥檚 Controller of Television, Norman Collins, was an adventurous scheme that would advertise the international ambitions of the 大象传媒 as well as its pioneering spirit.
Until then, television had been a decidedly national affair, limited by a geography of thought as much as by the restricted propagation properties of very high frequency (VHF) broadcasting. Collins' idea would change the 大象传媒's televisual horizon and deliver a world鈥檚 first into the bargain.
For Tony Bridgewater, the engineer in charge of the programme, it was "one of the most exciting and important developments that came along in our history". By erecting a transmitter on the Calais Town Hall the signal was sent via microwave link to a receiver on top of a wartime radar mast in Dover, from where it was relayed to London. Starting at 9.35pm on 27 August 1950 and lasting just over an hour this live broadcast, modest in its own terms, helped redefine the future of television internationally.
While no more than a clip survives of the original broadcast, the 大象传媒 Written Archive Centre at Caversham holds a copy of the filming schedule that, along with an extract of one of the prepared televised sequences, demonstrates both the range and editorial tone of the programme.
For the 大象传媒鈥檚 Peter Dimmock, charged with producing this broadcasting first, it was an opportunity to bring something of the spectacular to a city so recently torn apart by war.
The idea of "Eurovision" as George Campey, the originator of the term describes, was an attempt to combine both the practical reality of what had been achieved in Calais with a conceptual sense of what this meant for the future of television.
While the Eurovision Song Contest was, and remains, the most high profile product of European television cooperation it was the technical infrastructure of the Eurovision network across Western Europe that was where the real value lay.
For Joanna Spicer, the 大象传媒鈥檚 television programme planner at the time who later represented the Corporation at the influential European Broadcasting Union, it was the international exchange of news rather than entertainment programmes that was most important, leading the way to a worldwide network of broadcasters.
The live broadcast from Calais was a calling card that helped to shape the future of cooperative international television. It presented broadcasters with new technological challenges and programme opportunities that would transform the medium over the coming years. Just as importantly, for the growing television audience in the United Kingdom, it threw open the doors to a world beyond these shores.
The International Scene
Television not only provided new and exciting ways of seeing and comprehending the familiar, it also gave audiences the opportunity to explore, through a visual medium, what they did not yet already know. The Second World War had brought the wider world into the lives and homes of people around the UK and with it, an appetite for understanding the international scene.
The 大象传媒 Television Service was keen to harness this interest when it restarted broadcasting in 1946. Programmes such as Foreign Correspondent and a range of editorial styles, including travelogue and reportage, gave viewers a new window onto the world.
Over the following decade of television broadcasting and beyond it became possible to beam into people鈥檚 living rooms live broadcasts from around the world, at the flick of a switch. Taking advantage of the development of European and international broadcast infrastructure networks, television simultaneously shrunk the world while expanding the viewers' experience of it.