The world of British television off and on the screen, as it was sixty years ago.

The Cynical World of Arthur Askey

It’s Jon Pertwee‘s 36th birthday.

Ignoring this, one of The Times‘s “Special Correspondents” writes that the I.T.A. has plans for a national television network aims to cover over 80% of the population, and provide alternative commercial programme service for London (and perhaps elsewhere) by 1959. The plans for the initial network involve opening three stations a year in 1956, 1957 and 1958 and two per year thereafter.

He or she also mentions T.V. Times, the first issue of which is due to be published on 20 September.

Over at the BBC, expectations are that their first live tests of colour television will take place in August, the transmissions on the Alexandra Palace frequency to take place after the normal service closedown. A BBC spokesman is optimistic about colour TV’s prospects and is quoted as saying, “We are hopeful that some time in 1958, or just after, we shall get something going.”

The paper also carries a report from New York which refers to an experiment which is being conducted by Bing Crosby Enterprises Incorporated, which has demonstrated a process of recording moving colour sound television programmes to half-inch tape and then played back.

Robert Cannell, writing in the Daily Express, had little that was complimentary to say about yesterday’s You Know What People Are. He was unimpressed by Priestley – “Priestley as an actor was as big a flop as his script”; sketches about an automated factory and Big Brother were deemed inferior to works by Chaplin and Orwell; and he suggested that “Arthur Askey and Eric Barker do the job of cynical comment on the world so much better.” Arthur Askey? Cynical?

On screen today are golf from St. Andrews and cricket from Old Trafford as well as more from Llangollen, a half-hour at a dinner “in honour of Sir Anthony and Lady Eden” with a speech from Clement Attlee, a Northern Irish magazine programme entitled Ulster Mirror, and the second part of a portrait of an aircraft carrier in No Ordinary Ship.

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