A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DJohn Logie Baird : TV is Dead. Long Live TV by Andrew Chitty
"TV is Dead. Long Live TV", a BBC 'Horizon' Special was broadcast on 2nd November 1996. This file contains the production notes and a modified transcript
As television reaches its 60th Anniversary, barely a day goes by without an announcement of some new initiative promising to revolutionise TV - 500 channels; flat-panel displays; movies on demand; digital signals from transmitters or satellites. But are these really the future of television or a dead end which will deliver just more of the same? To coincide with the anniversary of the first TV broadcasts, this HORIZON SPECIAL looks back to the pioneering years when television was first produced and asks: where are the current experiments which will produce not just more TV, but a completely new medium - truly interactive TV, where we can all be programme makers. The BBC transmissions of November 1936 are recognised as the birth of the TV era, but for more than 10 years a group of enthusiasts inspired by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had been experimenting with television and their own transmissions Until recently it was thought that none of these transmissions had been recorded, but HORIZON will show for the first time remarkable images of TV's "earliest days", recently recovered by computer technology. Andrew Chitty's programme draws on the memories of the last few survivors of those days of thrilling experiment, the people who worked alongside Baird and developed the very first broadcasts. TV is Dead. Long Live TV recaptures that pioneering spirit, and searches the world for their latterday counterparts. For 60 years Television has been the most powerful meduim on Earth. But now, according to American Technology writer George Gilder, "We are at the end of the history of television." Whatever is the new medium that will replace it, it will not succeed if it merely provides us with more choice. "TV has locked us out, and that has to change," says Stephen Heppel, British director of East Anglia's Ultralab. "We have to participate." Today's holy grail is Interactive Television. HORIZON visits the world's largest experiment, Time Warner's Full Service Network, and finds it wanting. Despite the hundreds and millions invested and the protestations of the companies involved, these trials have failed. Instead the programme looks to the growth of truly interactive media and asks: could the present cluncky, slow and visually boring Internet be the true way forward? From the Hebridean Isle of Mull, where artists Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie are making Boswell and Johnson's "Tour of the Isles" interactive, to New York's "East Village", a sexy on-line soap-opera, we look for the new programming which could make this a medium as popular as Television. "The ability to sit back and be entertained will never go away," says William Randolph Hearst, President of Internet-TV station wannabee@Home. But in the age of the internet, where (as we show) kids can watch five things at once, television as we know it will never be the same. TV is dead. Long Live TV. Transcript File Note: this version does not carry the timings, shot descriptions etc. For these go to the original web site and download the hyperlinked MS Word Document
ANNOUNCER: Hello everybody. This is the BBC Television station at Alexandra Palace.NARRATOR: 60 years on, surviving members of that club return to Alexandra Palace to celebrate their pioneering deeds.
SYLVIA PETERS: All you had was a camera and then somebody did say to me: well you must think that the camera is the person you're talking to and that's I suppose how I learnt.NARRATOR: For 60 years television has been the preserve of broadcasters beaming their messages to us with no comeback. Some people see a very different future, one where we will all be programme makers.
KAREN GUTHRIE and NINA POPE
KAREN GUTHRIE: We are retracing the route of Boswell and Johnson, the route that they took around Scotland and the Inner Hebrides in the late 18th-century. Instead of, of publishing our experiences in a written journal, we're publishing it on the Internet daily so it becomes like a live diary.NARRATOR: By making their hypertext journal available to anyone hooked up to the Internet, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie are pioneering a new medium where programme makers and the audience work together. In the current jargon, it's interactive. The jerky images make the Internet look an implausible challenger to television, but every medium has to start somewhere. Although the official birth of TV was in 1936, the first demonstration was 10 years earlier by John Logie Baird. This is a reconstruction of the apparatus using Baird's original model, a dummy he called Stookey Bill. The pictures were created by a massive spinning disc. As it rotated, the image was broken into 30 vertical strips and captured by a photoelectric cell.
RAY HERBERT
RAY HERBERT: Well although the 30 line pictures were relatively crude inasmuch that they were just 30 strips to make up a, a picture, the main interest from the point of view of those who were building their sets was that they were producing things which had never been done before. It was quite impossible to see an announcer over the wireless making the announcements and that really was the thrill of, of, of the early television.NARRATOR: By 1929 Baird had an experimental studio and was broadcasting short programmes every evening on radio transmitters. These early days were experimental, not only for the viewers, but for the performers.
BETTY BOLTON
BETTY BOLTON: We didn't have very much room. We were just photographed to the waist you know. I was a little bit apprehensive especially the song I sang you know, 'I don't want to climb a mountain', and I had to be at the top of a very thick rope and then as I was singing to come down I discovered there weren't any notches for my feet, so I kept on singing and slid down the best I could, torn hands and knees, but I didn't mind because it was successful. That was all that mattered do you see?NARRATOR: We have nothing but memories of these earliest programmes, or so it was thought until earlier this year when an aluminium disc labelled 'Television' was discovered, computer analysis of the recording yielded a remarkable piece of digital archaeology.
DONALD McLEAN
DONALD McLEAN: You get to a stage where the picture comes out at you like a ghost from the past. I must admit I felt a bit like Howard Carter must have felt like when he opened up the, the tomb of Tutankhamen and walked in and it's a sort of, and started to see the, the, the wonders and treasures. It was a private recording made, we believe, in a house in Ealing from off-air connected to somebody's wireless using a domestic recorder which was available at the time and it's really rather an exciting recording. It's the only one of its kind.NARRATOR: The disc shows a variety performance with a series of presenters popping into view, followed by a group of 6 dancers, now identified as the then famous Paramount Astoria Girls. In its 60 years lifespan, television has certainly come a long way, but as a medium it has a fatal flaw.
Prof STEPHEN HEPPELL
PROF. STEPHEN HEPPELL: Television is a, is a narrative medium, it's, it's seductive, it's wonderful. I remember right back to my earliest days sitting in a darkened room with the curtains drawn, a little tiny 9 inch screen in front of me, and it was hypnotic then and when the programmes on, if they're good, they're stunningly good, but it's something that, that locks us out. We, we have to sit back on, on the couch, we have to be couch potatoes because we, we can't be part of the action, so it's exciting, but it excludes us.GEORGE GILDER Author Life After Television
GEORGE GILDER: The technology of broadcasting is essentially a top down technology. It assumes just a few transmitters and lots of receivers, lots of dumb terminals essentially, and this necessarily means that there's going to be a very small number of choices that are imposed on many millions of people. With the new computer technologies that whole structure is overthrown and each computer not only can receive a vast array of images and information, but it also can originate and transmit itself.NARRATOR: Broadcasters all over the world are anxious to proclaim a digital future of better pictures and more choice, but satellite or terrestrial, wall-to-wall sport, or rolling news, their vision of hundreds of channels is just more of the same, old-fashioned one-way broadcasting. If we want two-way television the interactive future that Gilder believes in, going digital is not enough.
GEORGE GILDER: Digital technology doesn't become two-way until it's linked in a switched system where rather than you sitting around waiting for somebody to show a BBC programme that you want rather you go out and seek programmes from around the world.NARRATOR: The attraction of inter-active television has not been lost on the world's biggest media corporations. Over the last few years hundreds of millions have been spent on using the technology of computer networks to make testbeds for two-way TV. In Orlando, Florida, a stone's throw from Disney World, Time Warner's Full Service Network is the most advanced.
YVETTE GORDON
YVETTE GORDON: Hi, I'm Yvette Gordon with the Full Service Network and we're standing here at the Network Operations Centre and I'd like to walk you through some of the Network components that we utilise to run a movie. Let's see what happens.TOM FEIGE President, Full Service Network
TOM FEIGE: The Full Service Network is a fully interactive, digital television system. A number of executives in our company took a look at the available technology that was developing and they realised that all the components that were required to deliver services on demand, video programming on demand, all of those components were available, but that no-one had integrated those components into a working system.HAL WOLF Head of Content : FSN
HAL WOLF: Movies, video games and shopping. All three are multi-billion dollar industries in the United States and of course on a world-wide level. From there we've been expanding into services, such as banking, where they want to escape the rigours of brick and mortar establishments for their businesses and basically be able to bring their shop into every household that has a television set.ANNOUNCER: Television is essentially the entertainment of the home viewer and it's the family group that our producers and artists normally consider to be their audience. The GERRY FAMILY NARRATOR: The Full Service Network is aimed at the family audience, its content designed for the American home. Time Warner has signed up 4,000 families in a prosperous suburb of Orlando and is proud to display these guineapigs to journalists from all over the world. How has the switch to interactive TV changed their lives?
DIANA GERRYNARRATOR: But what kind of vision is this? Ask about television and they talk about technology. Ask about programmers and they talk about stamps. The technology isn't the problem. The real challenge is creating truly interactive programmes and that means more than just making movies available on demand.
GEORGE GILDER: Even in a world of video on demand you're still restricted to a few choices. They may be thousands of choices, but it's relatively limited choices and you yourself don't participate in evolving new community which is not only receiving and searching and seeking new material but also producing it.NARRATOR: Stephen Hepple is determined to examine how people actually use technology rather than how engineers want them to, and that means learning from the generation who will inherit our media-rich world. It's their abilities and desires which will dictate how television will evolve.
STEPHEN HEPPELL: ...the other side of that. We're interested in what you might be good at.NARRATOR: One place where Hepple has seen kids strut their critical stuff is on the Internet. Walthamstow School for Girls is one of a number of colleges that the Ultralab has connected to scientists and engineers around the UK. The girls have gone far beyond just asking questions of the experts and the crucial moment seems to have been when they started to produce material of their own.
JEAN JOHNSON
JEAN JOHNSON: They are creating taking scanned images, digital images, getting them on the computer for everybody to see and people seeing their work, commenting on their work and taking part in it is very important, as is the chat. It's the interactivity, the exchange of ideas that's very important and provides a real stimulus.NARRATOR: And when a generation who expect interactivity are let loose on the Internet they find it compares all too favourably with television.
GIRL: Say if I'm bored with what's on TV then my computer's always, there's always, it's always there for me to do something on it even though I'm not hooked up on the Internet, but if the Internet's like an added thing, it's something else to do. I think if I did have the Internet at home I wouldn't watch as much TV.NARRATOR: An earlier generation were equally baffled by television at the world's first outside broadcast in 1931.
RAY HERBERT: The night before the Derby it was raining and they were lining up their equipment and they were up on the racecourse of course and the control room was at Long Acre near Covent Garden and a policeman seeing this came and thought he would come up to have a look to see what television was all about, so when the policeman got there he said hello, what's all this television business, and the engineer said oh, we could see you in our place at Long Acre and my colleague said he could see the rain coming off your helmet and the chap said no, of course you couldn't, he says, how could you when I'm here and he's there, you see. The, the copper was handed the telephone and he asked for the number at the Baird offices and got through and the engineer said oh hello Constable, yes I saw what you were doing, you were standing on one foot and then you blew your whistle, and the copper just couldn't understand it. It was beyond his ken. He sort of shook his head and just walked away completely mystified.NARRATOR: The Internet has already replaced television in the lifestyle of millions of young adults.
BONNIE BURTON: I find the more of the time I'm online the less I want to be around people. If I can connect with the people I want to connect with online I'll do it there. I rarely go out to eat, I usually have a stash of junk food which is not rare for people on line to do. They'll just take whatever's closest and just go right to their computer and log on, so that's what I do most of the night. I usually get to bed around 2 or 3, and, and then I wake up at 6, and on the weekends I don't go to bed at all. But I, I got started pretty young. I mean I, I first started playing computers when I was like about 7. I remember having nightmares of something called syntax error. I watch TV when my computer network is down. I haven't watched the news in a long time, which is funny 'cos I was a journalism major at college. I hate the news. I think it's pathetic 'cos now I get my serious news on the Internet. Now I can talk to someone that's in Bosnia right now. I think older people don't understand that they can get real news right now and they'd rather have it pre-censored, pre-fed and pre-thought out, so they don't have to think about it. I think with the older generation they're so used to coming home after a hard day at work and just veging out in front of something. What I'm doing is something that's interactive and I feel like I'm being productive. In front of the TV I don't feel productive, I just sort of feel like a zombie. I'm not too sure why older people want to be zombies, but if they do that's their gig, so I'll let them.NARRATOR: To somebody who's spent a lifetime in the TV business, these attitudes are incomprehensible.
GENE JANKOWSKI
GENE JANKOWSKI: The Internet I associate more with cable and with phone companies. It has nothing, the Internet has nothing to do with why people want to watch 60 minutes or ER or Dallas. In the last couple of years there's been a tremendous amount of attention focused on technology and the new equipment and digitalisation etc and so forth and my attitude is that we cannot lose sight of the fact that it's not technology that gives value to man, but rather it is people with creative ideas that give value to the technology. We don't go out and buy a VCR just because we want to own a VCR, we buy it because it gives us the opportunity to see the creative programming that we can play through our VCR.NARRATOR: Long before the Internet, the pioneers of television faced the same challenge, having invented the technology to create the artistic forms that would make people want to watch.
RAY HERBERT: Because of the limitations, the fact that the scanner or camera was in a fixed location, most of the programme material was of a fairly static nature. Violin players, conjurors, instant cartoonists and that sort of thing made up the bulk of the programmes, but considering the limitations they were very enterprising in what they endeavoured to put across.NARRATOR: Despite the limitations, right from the start experiments were made to develop the medium. This is a recreation of the first television play The Man with a Flower in His Mouth broadcast in 1929.Within just a decade technical quality had advanced enormously. Baird's mechanical system was vastly improved giving 200 line resolution, but in the competition for the BBC broadcast at Alexandra Palace in 1936 it lost out to the first electronic cameras.Based around cathode ray tubes they could produce pictures of over 400 lines, were much more manoeuvrable and were obviously the way of the future. Technical progress went hand-in-hand with advances in programme production, but most pre-war television programmes were adaptations of successful formats from other media, mainly from radio, then in its golden age.
BILL WARD
BILL WARD: Many of the shows were radio shows translated into television. They were based on a radio format of comedy sketch, visiting artist, middle comedy sketch, visiting artist, end sketch which is pure radio, but translated into television terms and it was in those days, certainly as far as light entertainment was concerned, a lot of radio put to pictures.JOHN PIPER Performer
JOHN PIPER: What sound broad-casting has done for music television may do for painting and sculpture. In the last few months I've been taking works from London galleries to the Alexandra Palace and commenting on them and showing them.BILL LYON-SHAW BBC Alexandra Palace
BILL LYON-SHAW: We were creating a medium you know, I mean we had a studio, we had 3 cameras with upside down lenses and everything else and work inside, all the problems of the world, but we were making a medium, television.NARRATOR: If the Internet is to challenge TV it's to the pioneering pre-war years we should look for inspiration, to the first programmes specifically designed for the new medium, like Picture Page with its pretence of audience participation.
WOMAN: BBC Television? This is the switchboard of Picture Page, topical magazine introducing visitors, types and personalities. You're through, you're looking at Pipe Major Matthews, the bagpipe man from Trafalgar Square.NARRATOR: The $64 million question is where do we look for the pioneers of the medium that doesn't quite yet exist? Who'll devise the programming that'll make the Internet as successful as TV? We've already glimpsed one possibility - Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie's "Hypertext Journal". As they roam around the Highlands they're exploring how to create an interactive documentary.
KAREN GUTHRIE: We're making a live Internet web site based on our journey that we're doing at the moment around Scotland which in turn is, is based on the route of Boswell and Johnson. The main thing we wanted to do is see if the Internet could be used in an interestingly interactive way beyond the usual, the usual way of clicking on a, on an icon on a screen. We, we felt that computers and the Internet could, could be used interactively in a way much bigger than that.NARRATOR: Interviewing local people, visiting ancient sites and re-interpreting an historic journey are the classic elements of TV documentary, but like the pioneers of early television, Nina and Karen are having to learn how to reinvent the form using the technology of the new medium.
KAREN GUTHRIE: We've used mainly a digital camera, a video camera and still photography as well. A digital camera's been the most heavily used actual piece of equipment we've taken with us because it's so instant we can just take the photographs, feed it back into the computer minutes later and they're there and we can manipulate them and we can use them in web pages almost immediately.NARRATOR: The backbone of the "Hypertext Journal" is a diary containing pictures and artworks created over the course of the journey. There are links to provide additional information, both within the site and on the wider Internet, but above all it's interactive. Anyone logging on is encouraged to E-mail the authors, allowing the audience to shape the outcome of the journey. Every night Karen and Nina load up new material onto the Internet over the phoneline and download E-mail from the audience, and they've tried hard to accommodate any suggestions in the evolving structure of the journal.
KAREN GUTHRIE: We haven't had an unmanageable amount of E-mail requests thank goodness, so those that we have got we've taken quite seriously. There have been one or two which have, have been impossible for us to do because of geographical location.NARRATOR: By encouraging those who log on to the site to influence the narrative a hypertext journal demands far more from its audience than the simple choices of interactive television.
KAREN GUTHRIE: We've had to think about where we're going and whether it's as possible for us to actually carry out their request and I think to actually go to that extent is, is, is quite a high level yeah. We haven't, we haven't given people a questionnaire or a yes/no option. We've had, they've had to actually write an E-mail to us.NARRATOR: Documentaries have always made large demands on small audiences. Interactive ones expect us to do even more work, but television didn't get where it is today on a diet of serious programming. If the Internet is to supersede TV it'll have to satisfy our less worthy tastes and provide mass market entertainment like that television mainstay, the soap opera.
CHARLES PLATKIN
CHARLES PLATKIN: We realised about 2 years ago that eventually entertainment was going to take over and be a substantial part of the World Wide Web just like other mediums, like, just like other media - radio, television and so forth. So we focused ourselves on what kind of entertainment would really be the most appropriate, be captivating for, for an audience and we looked at the prime time soaps in America and saw the Melrose Places and 90201 and the Dallas and so forth and, and realised that the prime time soap was really the way to go.NARRATOR: Though shot using a combination of still photographs and low end video with its cast of young and beautiful New Yorkers and their extremely lurid personal lives, the East Village is true soap opera.
WOMAN (READING): As much as she hated to admit it because it made her feel like she was betraying Mick she had no doubt that Mick had slept with Lila. He didn't know what to say, she just looked at Lila and put her hands in her face and yelled get away from me.NARRATOR: When you log on to the East Village you can explore the story in a way impossible on TV. Missed a twist in the plot. No problem. Every episode is available at the touch of a button, complete with story, pictures and video clips to download. Forgotten who's been sleeping with who - then click into areas devoted to each character. It's interactive in the fashion of many sites on the Internet, but The East Village also provides space for the audience as part of the serial. In cliques devoted to each character you can enter a discussion with other members of the audience, the writers, or even receive E-mail from the characters themselves.
CHARLES PLATKIN: When you join the character's clique you actually can see all the other members of the clique and you can mass e-mail them, you know if you want to tell all of them a story that happened to you, you can actually just pull one aside and communicate with them, and what happens is you start to, because it's an intellectual audience, you start to see them communicating with each other about very interesting topics, not just related to The East Village but for example if Eve's boyfriend stands her up or they have a control, a power issue between them, the clique community actually talks about that and the power relationships that they've had with men and women in their lives and so forth.NARRATOR: This is a quite different idea of interactivity, providing a space within the programme where we can all be critics, but who decides the story, does the script-writer read the cliques to work out what to do with his characters?
FRED STEWART
FRED STEWART: No I really don't because then you get into the problem - at least this is my opinion - then you get into the problem of the network stuff, all they're doing is reading the Q ratings which is the popularity ratings of the actors and actresses. And if, you know if Betty Lou on "one-day to live" has a high Q rating then the producers are going to say well she has to do this to the writers and that's the last thing I want to do because I, I've been in that trap and you know if I, if I think that Betty Lou's a boring character that I'd love to kill off in some gory murder, you know I don't want to, I don't want to know which ones that are pop, popular.NARRATOR: Providing a communal space for the audience is one way Internet -based programming can appeal to the mass market and remain interactive. It may not be as deep or as demanding as Nina and Karen's "Hypertext Journal", but then neither are the TV programmes it hopes to supersede.
FRED STEWART: It's very much like being in Hollywood in 1910, or in TV right after the Second World War because no-one really knows the rules.NARRATOR: At the moment the Internet is slow and cluncky. Twenty seconds of video can take 20 minutes to download, but it works, and unlike television soaps The East Village is available simultaneously all over the world.
WOMAN: None of this would have even happened if it weren't because of you.NARRATOR: The triumph of television was never just about technology or programmes. The broadcasters have been crucial, financing the programmes and packaging them as channels the audience could understand and trust. Now there are new companies promising to fulfil the same role for the combination of television and the Internet. One of them is headed by a famous media name.
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST: @Home is really a system that brings Internet service over cable television into people's homes at very high speeds, speeds much higher than can be obtained by dialling up an Internet service provider, and the system is always on @Home system like television, and then you have unlimited access to the Internet at very high speeds.NARRATOR: @Home looks much more like a combination of television and computer than today's Internet with windows allowing access to different streams of material and video at the click of a button. The secret is a device called a cable modem which allows data to be downloaded hundreds of times faster than at present, and that increasing speed will change the whole medium.
RICHARD GINGRAS
RICHARD GINGRAS: This screen that you see here if I were accessing that over a standard telephone line it would take me probably a half hour just for the page to appear, whereas here we're talking about it being there in a couple of seconds, so it really creates a completely different experience and moves the medium much closer to where we all expect this medium will ultimately go.NARRATOR: The service is divided into sections for audiences with particular interests like specialist cable TV channels. Is that what it's trying to do, recreate the television channel for an interactive world?
RICHARD GINGRAS: It's not like just television, it's not like print it's all of these media combined. These fast broad band networks allow us to do video, but that doesn't mean that this is a medium that will be just like television. I think it'll be everything but that, and let me explain why. I can send an e-mail message and communicate with the, the editor of this section, this service, so it's, it's a fully interactive medium, the audience is less an audience which sits, which simply sits back and passively absorbs the material that's sent at them. In this instance the audience can take and participate in the experience itself.NARRATOR: @Home combines interactive developments with channel presenters giving the feeling of editorial presence that we expect from television.
PRESENTER: If aliens took a trip from their home planet to the Big Apple it might look something like Losers guide to New York...NARRATOR: The viewer can choose to do the work, or be entertained. It's this combination of the interactive and the passive that Will Hearst thinks is the key to the future.
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST: The ability to sit and be entertained is going to last for a very long time. I liken it to this. Sometimes you'd like to pay Frank Sinatra 20 bucks and you say here, here's 20 bucks, you sing, I'll sit. Sometimes you want to make a drink for yourself, sometimes you'd like to have the bartender make a drink for you, so I think the notion of being able to sit and be entertained is never going to go away. Passivity is not all bad. Sometimes you'd like to drive, sometimes you'd like to have someone drive for you and particularly if the person who's doing the programming has good taste and has a sense of pacing and sort of puts on a show, why not sit and watch it, so I don't think the Internet is about the extinction of television.NARRATOR: 60 years on another generation are baffling their parents with the pleasures of a new medium.
SAM: When I first got my Megadrive. I sort of played on it non-stop. I'd totally forgotten about telly. I've got 11 games, I can't remember them all now. 2 football games which are FIFA and Ultimate Soccer. I watch TV at weekends, there's really good cartoons on at weekends but not like week days only rubbish stuff.I play football quite a lot with my friends. I've got quite a selection of video football videos. Videos likelast an hour or so of film but computer games here are like lots of levels of computer games . It takes more than a week to start getting going and getting good at it and stuff And I've got history of the world which is entirely mine. It's sort of like more fun because words are sometimes spoken to you (MUMBLES) and pronounciations and stuff. And you can play down the Net kind of and you sort of like phone down the Internet on the computer and it's really good, you can write messages to each other like "die scum"and stuff . At first I wasn't very good, but then I'm like better than Dad now. Sometimes he says oh I bet you can't do that, so I come on and literally do it instantly and he's like standing there gaping. I spend more time on the computer than watching telly. My friend Robert's got one, my friend Thomas has got one, my friend George has got one, my friend Daniel's got one, my friend Sam's got one. All of them have got them actually. I'm trying to think of a friend who doesn't. Er, I don't think I've got one.Narrator DAVID STAFFORD
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