A Night in at the Cinema: The Film Première on 1950s British Television

Abstract

The early years of television saw an enormous amount of critical commentary attempting to explore and define the social and technological uses of the medium. Critics compared television to other media – radio, film or theatre – often proclaiming a unique combination of their technologies, aesthetics and experience. Television’s liveness, perceived as its crucial defining feature, was often compared to theatre, while its moving image was described as ‘radio with pictures’, a discourse which had an equally clear heritage in cinema. As these comparisons suggest, however, what was most clearly seen to differentiate film and television was live transmission, and this was used to map the differences between their aesthetics, address and experience. Typical of many perspectives at this time, Michael Clarke discussed this issue in the annual publication The Cinema 1952, arguing that television’s liveness could generate ‘the excitement of theatre and touch on regions where cinema cannot venture’ (Clarke 1952: 182). Clarke’s use of the metaphor of travel here – common in the discussion of early television – implies not merely a difference between the media, but a difference based upon a spatial and temporal distance. Cinema and television take us on different ‘journeys’ in different ways and according to Clarke, thus engage the viewer in very different experiences. Much of the early commentary tended to theorise these differences on the broad level of technology and aesthetics, and ignored the reality of the developing institutional relations between cinema and television. In line with subsequent perceptions of the 1950s, Clarke perceives British cinema and television to inhabit an autonomous existence. However, it is the aim of this article to discuss how cinema did ‘venture’ into television, and how television enabled a ‘venture’ to the cinema in ways which make the metaphor of travel