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to a stranger sipping a mint frappé. ‘Death has passed my way and put this flower in my mouth,’the stranger told him. He was dying of an epithelioma, a cancerous growth on his lip. He began evoking scenes of quotidian life which suddenly felt precious now he would soon no longer be able to witness them. ‘Helps me to forget myself,’ he said of his new habit of staring into shop windows, an unconscious allusion to the future power of television. ‘I never let it rest a moment – my imagination! I cling with it … to the lives of other people.’
    It was a bleak choice of play for this momentous broadcast, but its avant-garde minimalism – with only two speaking characters, lots of soliloquys and a twenty-minute running time – helped to conceal the medium’s imperfections, particularly the fact that the televisable area was so small that only one actor could appear at a time. ‘It was certainly startling, as well as helpful to the dialogue, to be able to see their every expression – even to the lifting of the eyebrows,’ noted the
Daily Mail
. ‘We even saw the gestures of their hands – although we had to sacrifice their faces for the time being.’ The
Manchester Guardian
’s reporter had to apologise to his readers for being unable to file a review. He had missed the entire broadcast, having arrived at the head of the queue to watch the Selfridge’s televisor just as it was fading out. 13
    As Anthony Burgess often reminded people, his hero James Joyce referred to television in
Finnegans Wake
as a ‘bairdboard bombardment screen’ and a ‘faroscope’, terms which convey the interwar excitement about the cathode ray’s capacity to reveal visions of faraway things. (Burgess misremembered it as the more melodious ‘bairdbombardmentboard’.) Although highbrow in most of his other tastes, Burgess remained generous about television all his life. ‘A compulsive viewer who will sit guiltily in front of test-cards and even
This Is Your Life
,’ he wrote on taking over as the
Listener
’s television critic in May 1963, ‘I groan my way towards palliation of the guilt – the penance of dredging words out of my eyeballs.’ 14
    Burgess actually felt little guilt. As
Listener
critic he watched no more television than he did normally, staying up all Friday night to write his column. In November 1963, after returning from a holiday in Morocco, he wrote that it was easy ‘to indulge the romantic delusionthat the life of goatherds, beggars, Marrakesh buskers, and Tangier junkies is
real
life, and that the British evening with television and chestnuts is a sort of substitute. Nonsense, of course – a mixture of sentimental Rousseauism and snobbish xenomania … The Moors would be better off looking at [the soap opera]
Compact
than at nothing.’ Burgess remained unafflicted by the snobbery about television that suffused British intellectual life when it became a mass form in the 1950s, perhaps because he had been excited about it in its embryonic form. In later life, he became a fan of Benny Hill, calling him ‘one of the great artists of our age’, and at Hill’s memorial service in 1992 it was he who gave the eulogy. 15
    In fact it seems unlikely that Burgess saw the Pirandello on television as he claimed, especially since he wrongly dated it to 1932. 16 In the summer of 1930 Burgess was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy called John Wilson, and there were unlikely to have been many Baird televisors in the poor area of Moss Side, Manchester, where he lived with his parents above a tobacconist’s shop. In any case, the broadcast was on a Monday afternoon, a school day, and the studious Burgess was an unlikely truant. He either embellished the truth as a novelist might or, more likely, rewrote it in his memory as people are wont to do with such an ephemeral activity as television viewing.