The mystery of Alexandra Palace Studio A

John Wyver writes: When the BBC television service at Alexandra Palace began operations officially on 2 November 1936, it was fitted out with four Emitron electronic cameras supplied by the recently-established joint venture company Marconi-EMI. One or more of these cameras was mounted on a crude dolly, and so was minimally mobile. There were two further cameras linked with a pair of film projectors to provide telecine facilities to play in film sequences. And the six vision channels were linked to a control room that allowed producers to mix between them. In very basic terms, this the set-up that television studios have worked with ever since. (The image, from John Swift’s Adventure in Vision, 1950, shows two cameras of the studio set-up for The Importance of Being Earnest, December 1937.) The mystery is that there appears to have been no model for this configuration. The BBC’s two television studios before this, operational from 1932 to 1935, as well as that used by John Logie…