Not Adjust Your Set

John Murray (hardback) 2003
available at www.amazon.co.uk
available at www.blackwell.co.uk

In a world where the majority of programmes are recorded and perfected before they reach us, it is hard to imagine an era where every radio and television programme went out live. Yet this was the situation as late as the 1950s. If a show was repeated, the cast simply returned and performed it again in exactly the same way, since there was no technology for recording it. If an actor forgot his lines, a special button was pressed to cut off the sound to the viewer: in the meantime the other performers continued mouthing their parts to give the impression that a temporary technical fault had occurred, while the culprit was given a prompt.

The actors and actresses who worked in the BBC's first television studios at Alexandra Palace had - literally - to think on their feet, running from set to set, often while changing costume and making cuts to the script at the same time. In Do Not Adjust Your Set, Dame Eileen Atkins, Wendy Craig, the late Sir Nigel Hawthorne and other old broadcasting hands recall the frenetic conditions in which such television classics as Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars were made, and the extraordinary hazards they had to deal with - scenery collapsed, camera cables combusted, actors went missing, and even died. Life was no easier, either, for the luckless assistants responsible for costume, design and props.

Kate Dunn's hilarious book, a sequel to Exit Through the Fireplace, her best-selling account of the great days of rep, captures the humour and ingenuity of those early days through the anecdotes of those who were there. It traces the story of live broadcasting from its beginnings in the radio broadcasts of the 1920s through the advent of television in 1936 to the gradual demise of live broadcasting in the late fifties. Do Not Adjust Your Set takes us behind the scenes of a drama that shaped the modern world.

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