Plan for cinema (1936)

ON THE NATURE OF CINEMA 57 when vested interests consider the time is both ripe and safe, no sooner, no later. The prelude is the commercial necessity for a new kind of cinema. For what is entertainment television if it is not cinema in the home? The television receiver, as addition to and part of the broadcast receiver, visually is identical with the amateur cine screen. Outside direct television transmission — news events of the first magnitude, political speeches, talks by distinguished persons, and so on — the remainder, and by far the greater part, must prima facie be in the nature of film entertainment. It is inconceivable that a television transmitter directed on to a play taking place in a theatre could be anything but boring to a degree. It would be an indifferent replica of what was happening in the theatre condensed to the size of an advertising poster or less. And I wonder very much whether merely by seeing those ladies who stamp their feet with such violence in the vaudeville programmes, our eyes are to become transfixed towards the television screen in hopeless abandon at the elegance of their calves, when we have already been so severely stampeded into stupefaction by their multiplicity in the all-screaming, all-jazz-stammering Hollywood musical? Admittedly, the eyebrows of George Robey and the moustache of Harry Tate are corollaries to what those admirable comedians have to say, and I feel something is sadly amiss when I hear only their voices through my loud-speaker. Indeed, I think fifteen minutes of Mr. Robey or Mr. Tate would be infinitely preferable to, and considerably