The Ballad of Stooky Bill

Available for 18 days

The first face to be seen on a TV 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. It had 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 TV has become our ubiquitous friend, the flat locus of our dreams and desires, a place of excitement and entertainment. Also offering shock and sometimes carnage, it’s 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. Producer: David Stenhouse First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2021.