The BBC: A Century on Air

by David Hendy

The next day the reporter from the Times described an experience that sounded more like a Victorian magic lantern display than the birth of a modern new medium. Staring at the ghostly, juddering image, he said he had felt as though he were ‘prying through a keyhole at some swaying, dazzling exhibition of the first film ever made’. The reporter from the Observer was a little more prescient. ‘Like the squeakings of the first phonograph and the flickerings of the first moving-pictures,’ he wrote, ‘the beginnings of Television must not be judged by actual performance; they must rather be regarded as signs and portents of marvels yet to come.’ The only truly damning response to the broadcast came in a letter to Sieveking from his old wartime friend, Hugh Kingsmill Lunn. ‘How sinister it all looks’, Lunn told him. ‘Don’t let the science go too far, I beg you… People will soon be carrying some bloody little gadget which will enable them to pick out any absent friend and see exactly what he or she is doing. Stop it, while there’s yet time, please.’