Radio: Television

Londoners have television in their homes, pubs and clubs. France has constructed an Eiffel Tower transmitter, expects to telecast to the public within a few months. Germans have television-equipped telephone service between Berlin and Leipzig, can ring up faces as well as voices. But in the U. S., where the radio industry is private and the broadcasters have to play the game with their own chips, caution has kept television in the laboratory experimental stage.

RCA now makes an experimental receiving set which projects into a slanting mirror a greenish, almost lineless image 7½ in. tall by 10 in. wide. And NBC has a transmitter on top of Manhattan’s Empire State Building which has telecast more than 40 miles. However, no big U. S. radio group wants to get into commercial television until the purchaser may be assured that his set will not be obsolescent for a reasonable period of time, and until television shows can command fuller attention than sound radio now gets. Well aware that the technical side of television presents no more complications, drawbacks and headaches than its artistic side, CBS has Columnist Gilbert Vivian Seldes masterminding the aesthetics of television for it while RCA builds it a transmitter to go in the Chrysler Building tower (telecasting range depends on the height of the transmitting antennae). For a month NBC has been actually sending out shows several hours a week.* Last week, when the press was given a preview on what had been done, it was decided that test programming would continue throughout the summer.

NBC’s test programs include newsreels and industrial advertising films which are televized, and live entertainment. The chief drawback to the films is that the screen is so small that objects in the background are all but subvisible. There is practically nothing but drawbacks to the live programs. The actors, who tan under the Birdseye lights, must work at very close quarters to stay within the camera’s focus. They seem to have to compensate for physical restriction by overemoting. Twenty hours of rehearsal are required for an hour of telecasting (an average of four hours for an hour in broadcasting). The dramatic material should be artistically equivalent at least to a Grade B movie, and the problem of scaring up enough of it to run even one television station all year round is fairly staggering. The live drama now being put out by NBC is about on a par with an early Biograph Film, minus Mary Pickford.

In Britain, most popular television stunts have been telecasts of public events like tennis matches, boat races, fights, the Coronation. Recently, Londoners saw BBC Commentator Thomas Woodrooffe eat his hat before the television camera to keep a promise made in a sports broadcast. The hat was made of sugar-coated cake.

* Thirteen other U. S. broadcasting stations telecast periodically. These experimentations are chiefly technical. The material telecast includes static charts, films, occasional live programs.