The shape of things to come

Among writers of history a variety of genres flourish: they include battles, biographies and a significant date, such as 1066, 1492 or 1940. The television documentary maker, Denys Blakeway, has opted for 1936 in the belief that it was a better vintage, so to speak, than 1935 or 1937. Many Britons lived parallel lives, some in the new Ideal Home suburbs; a residue in what were euphemistically called Special Areas in the North East, South Wales and Scotland, as desperate then as they often are nowadays, even though the deprivation is not entirely material.

The year 1936 was certainly an auspicious one for television, with white-coated Nazi cameramen filming the summer games for relay to 18 tiny public screens, while later in the year, transmissions commenced from Alexandra Palace, all of two hours a day beamed to 400 receivers. ‘Television is an awful snare,’ confessed a disapproving Sir John Reith to his diary.

It was also a significant year for documentary film, symbolised by Harry Watt’s Night Mail, largely made in a GPO Film Unit studio in Blackheath rather than on a mail train hurtling between London and Glasgow. With evident fellow feeling Blakeway writes of the first showing of the rough cut to the fanatical producer, John Grierson:

Every director dreads the viewing … many executive producers have found it impossible to resist the temptation to bully and hector, and to denigrate the efforts of those who have laboured so hard.

Other harbingers of things to come were the Mass Observation surveys, inaugurated by Tom Harrison, in the wake of an abdication crisis which reeked of an elite stitch- up without proper regard for the views of their Majesties humbler ‘subjects’. The year ended with the monarchy saved and a badly designed HMS Queen Mary pitching dangerously in Atlantic storms which sent the furniture and pianos skidding.