Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr K
It was about an hour too long. The tecchy stuff of the 2 camera systems was interesting, but it's a story that's been told many times before.
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I've heard the story before, mainly in the 1986 drama I linked to earlier, but what I hadn't appreciated before was just how impractical Baird's system was. I knew the camera was immobile, but I hadn't appreciated how it needed to work in a dark box and wasn't even a camera as we'd understand the term today.
It was the classic example of a technological blind alley, complete with complex workarounds to cover shortcomings that ought really to have killed it off long before opening night. I'm probably going to watch The Fools on the Hill again now just to be sure, but I don't recall them really going into the reason Baird's system got the gig, and how it survived for even half its contracted six month trial. Even last night Dallas Campbell skimmed over it with a one-line reference to Baird's personal influence in having pushed for development of a TV service in the first place.
Of course the system was so utterly impractical that BBC4 couldn't actually recreate it at all. A 3ft diameter disc spinning at 6,000rpm in a vacuum chamber ... a massive machine to process film stock and deliver it to another Baird camera in time to delay the "live" broadcast by a mere 54 seconds ... beyond the budget of a single documentary and doubtless ruinously expensive back in 1936 too.
Absolutely fascinating though.