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The Ballad of Stooky Bill

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BBC Radio 4 - The Ballad of Stooky Bill

Kirsty Wark meets ventriloquist's dummy Stooky Bill, TV pioneer. With Alistair McGowan.

The first face to appear on TV wasn't human. Kirsty Wark quizzes the ventriloquist's dummy Stooky Bill, (Alistair McGowan) with words from poet John Burnside.

The first face to be seen on a television screen wasn't human. The image which assembled itself out of the static in John Logie Baird's first experimental TV test was a chalk-white ventriloquist's dummy with a lolling hinged mouth, reduced to grey on the cramped monochrome screen. Stooky Bill was selected for the first screen test because his face was a study in contrasts, and the lights of the first TV studio were so hot no flesh and blood creature could bear it (over time Stooky Bill's face cracked in the heat and his singed hair fell apart) Since then television has become our ubiquitous friend, the flat locus of our dreams and desires, a place of excitement, entertainment, but also shock, sometimes carnage, the place where celebrities frolic in the jungle, 9/11 was staged, where beheadings are screened. It is almost as though the animating spirit of tv is not Apollo but an anarchic, sinister dummy.  
In John Burnside's commissioned poem "The Ballad of Stooky Bill", the dummy becomes the animating daemon of TV, the sinister force that drives the square window where our dreams, our desires, our darkest appetitive impulses play out 24/7. Kirsty Wark interviews Alistair McGowan as Stooky Bill in a searing, unsettling vision of the pale white face that inhabited the first television signal, and has never let go.

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