Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television

YA?A history of television mainly in North America, but also in Europe during the years 1920-1948. Its strength is in the descriptions of early program production, specifically the physical conditions of the cramped, crowded studios; the extreme heat of the lights (Betty Furness kept a thermometer in her studio during her 15-minute show and it regularly registered 130 degrees Fahrenheit); the lack of rehearsals; and the often-sketchy scripts. Ritchie also chronicles the advent of televised sports and advertisements and the effects of World War II on broadcasting. The index is good on names of persons and companies, but weak on subjects.?Clodagh Lee, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Written by the director of such movies as The Candidate, Downhill Racer, and The Bad News Bears, this interesting and readable book is about the "prehistoric" days when television was in its birth and infancy. Included are all sorts of firsts from the 1920s to 1940s, such as the first TV systems and their inventors, the first TV shows (even before shows were scheduled to appear regularly), the first TV celebrities, the first commercial, and the first TV networks. Chapters on the race to build a workable TV system and difficulties producing the early TV shows in the minuscule, hot studios are especially interesting. Ritchie writes in an entertaining manner and bases his book largely on personal interviews with a number of men and women who were there. Recommended for public libraries.
Judy Hauser, Oakland Sch. Lib. Svcs., Waterford, Mich.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"No one has ever written comprehensively about TV programming before 1948," Ritchie maintains, so he fills the gap with this highly readable book on TV's very early days. He takes us way back, before Uncle Miltie, to a time when there were two competing forms of television, mechanical and electronic. Mechanical TV belonged to U.S. commercial radio networks and the BBC and probably would have predominated, but it was technically inferior. Once the networks decided to pay electronic TV's perfecter a fair price for his patents, electronic TV was off and . . . well, stumbling. Massive, immobile cameras, incredibly hot lights, and the generally unreliable technical aspects of early transmissions made them as much or more of an adventure than program content. The search for marketable programming and the fledgling technological development together produced such inadvertent entertainment gems as the 1933 BBC broadcast of an "infrared-ray technique that `stripped' cotton dresses off a line of dancing girls." And this happened years before Aaron Spelling! There's nothing new, either under the sun or over the air. Mike Tribby

A well-researched but dull account of the hungry, unkempt days of early television. Written by film director Ritchie (The Candidate, etc.), the book shows the chaotic beginnings that justified the once widely held belief that this gimmicky new technology had no future. A fuzzy picture was first telecast on a bulky monitor with a tiny screen in the 1920s by Philo T. Farsworth, a high school student in rural Utah. But it would be another 20 years before television was taken seriously in America. Ritchie chronicles many of TV's historic firsts. In 1927, for example, future president Herbert Hoover was the first public official to speak in front of a ``televisor'' in Washington D.C., while his wife appeared from New York. They were followed by a comedian in black-face who called his routine ``a new line of jokes in negro dialect.'' Television's first commercial was illegal, but this did not stop broadcasters from soliciting commercials. NBC earned seven dollars in 1937 for simply showing the face of a Bulova watch. Many of the early (live) commercials were more than artistic disasters: A newly invented ``automatic'' Gillette safety razor would not open on camera, and the hostess of a Tenderleaf tea commercial mistakenly lauded the quality of Lipton tea. The first television newscasts were also tentative affairs. News was considered the exclusive domain of radio, of which television was then a poor cousin; CBS's first newscast featured Lowell Thomas talking in front of a stack of sponsor Sonoco's oil cans. The BBC was technologically ahead of US companies, but it abruptly stopped transmission (in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon) when WW II broke out. A historical video would be better than written narrative for this material. The 77 black-and-white photos provided here hold the nonspecialist's attention, while the text rarely does. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.