Audio Documentary

Presented across two discs is a two-hour in-depth audio documentary on the dawn of television in Britain - from Baird's first experiments in Hastings in 1923, through the pioneering 30-line TV broadcasts by the Baird Company and the BBC, to the start of the BBC's high definition service in 1936 - all set in an international context and narrated by the BBC's first television news-reader - Richard Baker OBE RD.

The early pioneers featured on the documentary are: Betty Astell, A F Birch, T H Bridgewater, D R Campbell, Cyril Fletcher, W C Fox, R M Herbert, T M C Lance, N Loxdale, Marsland Gander, Victor Mills, Geoffrey Parr, J D Percy, P Reveley, C L Richards and William Taynton

There are 58 audio tracks on Disc 1 and 29 audio tracks on Disc 2. Click to get the full Track Listing.
 

Bonus Material

To supplement the documentary, the CD-ROM portion of Disc 2 contains a wealth of reference material. Click to get full listing of Bonus Material. This includes:

• the complete transcript of the documentary (in Adobe Acrobat format)
• over 8 hours of un-edited interview (in MP3 format)
• two fully-searchable (Adobe Acrobat) on-screen read-only versions of Bruce Norman's book "Here's Looking at You: the story of British TV 1908-1939"

For the first time, the Complete Collection of restored 30-line TV recordings (spanning 1927-1935) can be seen in their entirety. Along with a short film on the work of restoration, and extracts from a 1967 remake of the first British TV play (as a joint BBC-Baird production) there are over 52 minutes of MPEG-1 video clips to explore.

In addition there are several extras including some 1600x1200 images that can be used as computer wall-paper, some interesting early pictures to explore, a short biography of John Logie Baird (by Don McLean) and of one of the sponsors George Shiers (by Prof Chris Sterling of GWU), together with an extensive Bibliography and other material.
 

How to Buy

This CD is available to buy direct from this website. Please read the information below prior to purchasing to ensure maximum satisfaction with the product. if you have any doubts, please read the Reviews and Buyer's Feedback.

PayPal is the only accepted payment method (other than for company purchase orders). Please select from below depending on your location. Orders are normally despatched within 24 hours of receiving PayPal payment notification.

If you wish to buy by another means (credit card, cheque etc), please place your order through Len Kelly, owner of the excellent Kelly Books Limited at www.kellybooks.net.

I have been told that the above price is too low for the scope and content of the product. There are two reasons why this is so: the Shiers Trust Grant covered part of the production costs and I want to make the product affordable and hence available to as many people as possible.

As an illustration of its perceived value, a used copy of the above sold on eBay for £36 [Item no 6192471290 sold 18th July 2005].

Disc 2 of the set is an enhanced-CD (also known as Mixed-Mode or CD-EXTRA). It behaves like an ordinary CD-audio disc when in a CD or DVD player, where it plays the second part of the audio documentary. It behaves like a CD-ROM when used in a computer. The disc may auto-start to your computer's media player when first inserted. In that event, make sure that you close the media player software, then use My Computer or  Windows Explorer (or equivalent) to locate your removable disc drive. The content of the disc should then appear as a CD-ROM drive.

Double-clicking on Home (possibly with .htm extension showing) should open your browser and you can then proceed to navigate the disc. Should this fail, refer to the file list in the booklet and navigate to the folders /Audio, /Video and /PDF for the bonus content, where a Notepad text file will describe the contents in detail.
 

All content in this CD-ROM /enhanced-CD is copyright. The content is provided solely for personal or educational use.

Permission is denied for commercial use. The content shall not be copied, transmitted or broadcast.

The Acrobat PDF versions of Bruce Norman's book Here's Looking at You are provided in a format that precludes editing, copying or printing. These are the conditions under which the copyright owners - the Royal Television Society - have generously agreed to grant permission for release.

For any reason, whether personal, educational or commercial use, permission is denied for any public presentation, demonstration, performance or broadcast by any medium including not exclusively the Internet, conferences and exhibitions, without the Producer's written consent.

Purely for the purposes of convenience and for improving playback performance, permission is granted for copying the video content to your local storage device integral to your personal computer.

The material is provided on an 'as-is' basis and is not warranted for functionality. Operating systems, media decoders, formats can change as the market develops - potentially rendering material created using an earlier system unusable. However, the CD-audio is fully compliant with CD-audio standards, the video clips are all MPEG-1 industry standard and the audio clips are all MP3 industry standard, therefore the risk of obsolescence is minimised.)

The Producer shall not be liable for any indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of documents, video or audio material, or any of the data available on this product.

If access to the Bonus features is essential, you must have a PC compliant with the recommended requirements (listed below) or better. This product has been tested successfully on several types of PC.  All problems during Beta testing have been traced to the host machines or their configuration and not to the data on Disc2. Browser applications (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox to name a few) are becoming more user-configurable and hence there is an increasing likelihood that the mark-up HTML code used here may behave in the future in a way that was unintended when written. This is outside the Producer's control.
 

• PC running Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6
• Pentium or Athlon processor 1.6GHz or better with at least 512Mbytes of RAM.
• Multi-session-compatible 16x CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.
• Media Player software for MPEG-1 video and MP3 audio.
• 1024x768 or better 24-bit or more accelerated graphics.
• Audio Playback facilities.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader version 6 or later (for PC)

Feedback from Macintosh users say that they have had no problems accessing the CD content.

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All material in this page is copyright ©DFMcLean 2007 except where specified.

Last updated by Don McLean on 19-May-2007