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The Inner London Education Authority reconstructed the broadcast in 1967; perhaps it was this that he saw.
    It is, however, highly likely that Burgess listened to the first television programmes, for they were broadcast on the BBC’s radio wavelength. As an avid reader of the
Radio Times
and the
Listener
, he would certainly have known about television, and he had built his own crystal radio set to hear Sir Adrian Boult’s BBC Symphony Orchestra. After trying and failing to use his bed’s wire mattress as an aerial, because it was full of fluff, he bought aerials that reached to his bedroom ceiling; he could then pick up stations as far away as the continent, listening to them on his headphones before drifting off to sleep. 17 So when the BBC began supplementing its mid-morning television broadcasts with late-night ones on Tuesdays and Fridays, after the radio programmes had ended, he would have picked themup. These early television programmes had far more listeners than viewers. Tap dancing was a popular feature because, although early television screens could not really cope with such frantic motion, listeners appreciated the sound of dancers’ feet.

    Among those who did see the Pirandello play were an invited audience of VIPs, including Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of long-distance radio, who just before 3.30 p.m. on the Monday afternoon were winched up the outside of Baird’s Long Acre studio on a rickety open-air goods hoist with no railings. On the roof, they stood under a canvas canopy in front of a five-foot-high television, composed of 2,000 tiny incandescent bulbs spaced an inch apart, so the screen looked like a giant honeycomb. Each bulb lit up in turn to give the light and shade of the picture. Halfway through, the bulbs became so hot that they started to melt the screen’s edges. A panic-stricken note was sent from the roof to the studio below, where Baird said, ‘Tell them to go on, and let it melt.’ 18
    One of the viewers on the Long Acre studio roof was the booking agent of the nearby London Coliseum. On his recommendation, Sir Oswald Stoll, the Coliseum’s owner, hired the giant television for a fortnight’s run at the theatre, starting on 28 July 1930, showing it during intervals. As the lights went down in the auditorium, a master of ceremonies stood at the side of the stage with a telephone in his hand. On the widest proscenium arch in London, the giant television looked rather small. A human face appeared on screen, broadcast from the Long Acre studio a few streets away. ‘Would any member of the audience like to ask a question of the speaker?’ asked the MC. ‘Tell him to put his hand up,’ cried someone from the darkness of the stalls. The MC telephoned this instruction to Long Acre and the speaker raised his hand to his chin. More interactive experiments followed. The Lord Mayor of London, on screen, asked his wife in the audience what time dinner would be and she replied, by phone, ‘eighto’clock’. The ‘Charming Belles in Harmony’, Helen Yorke and Virginia Johnson, performed a duet with Yorke on stage and Johnson on screen. ‘There was a kind of rustling effect all over the screen,’ wrote
The Sphere
magazine, ‘but through it one could distinctly make out the features of one well known personage after another. One could not only hear them speak, but see their lips moving.’ 19
    The highlight of the run was the sixty-year-old music hall comedian George Robey, the ‘Prime Minister of Mirth’, doing a turn on the Coliseum stage, then running to nearby Long Acre while Baird showed a Robey film talkie and then, a little out of breath, appearing on television on the Coliseum big screen. It helped that Robey’s trademark costume – a bald-fronted wig, red nose and heavily blacked eyebrows – was easily viewable and his ‘whiplash diction’, in Laurence Olivier’s appreciative