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phrase, carried his voice through the theatre from the set. 20
    Television thrived among these big crowds. In June 1932 several thousand people at the Metropole Cinema near Victoria Station watched the Epsom Derby on a screen ten foot high by eight foot wide. Baird had shown the same race a year earlier, witnesses recording that ‘a good imagination was required’ and the horses and riders looked ‘like out-of-focus camels’. But this broadcast was more successful: the Metropole audience could see the bookmakers’ tic-tac hand signals and the horses rounding Tattenham Corner and flashing past the finish, though not even the announcer could tell who had won. Baird’s assistant, Tony Bridgewater, said that this time ‘you could at least tell they were horses’. Baird took a curtain call afterwards to cries of ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’, receiving a bigger cheer than the Derby winner, which turned out to be April the Fifth. 21
    In
Brave New World
, published that year, Aldous Huxley imagined a different future for television, in the ‘Galloping Senility’ ward of the sixty-storey Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. ‘At the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box. Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night,’ he wrote. The dying Linda was watching the semi-finals of a tennis championship with an expression of ‘imbecile happiness’, while ‘hither and thitheracross their square of illumined glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in an aquarium, the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world’. Huxley himself never owned a set and, interviewed in 1959, said that television was ‘a sort of Moloch which demands incessant sacrifice … the people who write for it just go quietly mad’. 22 His idea of television as an opiate of the masses in
Brave New World
was to become a familiar literary trope. In Pete Davies’s Huxleyan novel,
The Last Election
(1986), set in a Britain of the near future ruled by the Money Party, a cable TV channel distracts the unemployed masses from their inevitable death by involuntary euthanasia with the narcotic of twenty-four-hour snooker.
    Now that Huxley’s vision has hardened into cultural cliché, we have to return to 1932 to realise how prescient it was, for when he wrote
Brave New World
, television was not an ambient presence, our relationship to which has become, in the novelist Ian McEwan’s words, a ‘casual obsession which is not unlike that of the well-adjusted alcoholic’. 23 As an occasional public spectacle, it seemed to have more in common with older traditions of shadow theatre, magic lantern displays or the panoramas and dioramas of the Regency and Victorian periods – sound and light shows with moving canvases of London or scenes from literary works, often featured during intervals of plays, just as Baird’s giant television set had been at the Coliseum.

    The BBC’s experimental television broadcasts, coming from Broadcasting House, received scant attention. There were no schedules or listings so on four nights a week, a scattering of viewers tuned in at 11 p.m., not knowing what they would see. It might be Vic-Wells ballet dancers, the Rotherham comedian Sandy Powell saying ‘Can you hear me, mother?’, or Sally the Seal, brought to the studio in a large open Daimler and escorted up in the lift just so she could blow a saxophone and waggle her flippers for the camera. The press paid littlenotice unless there was a potential controversy. ‘Apparently the BBC had no objections to pyjamas,’ the
London Evening News
reported in November 1934, ‘for I learned today that [the comedian George] Harris will do an act called “I Never Slept a Wink Last Night” prancing round the television studio in pyjamas and trying to shave himself by the light of a flickering television