ABSTRACT
Two closely related tropes shaped television’s reception throughout the interwar years, namely the narratives of progress and magic. Underpinning most press coverage, but also present in specialized publications and technical reports, these narratives addressed the new medium’s potentialities as means of seeing at a distance. They provided an explanatory framework for understanding newness, while simultaneously boosting the sense of novelty surrounding television. These tropes are discussed in the chapter’s first section. The chapter’s second part shifts from an analysis of these discourses surrounding televisual displays to the study of the exhibits and their mise en scène. Drawing on Frank Kessler’s notion of the ‘spectacular dispositif’, it analyses the ways exhibition floors provided a visual and sensual spectacle constituting the first televisual experience for visitors before regular programming would become available.
