What I watched: An episode of Walt’s Workshop, an instructional show starring Walter Dervon that aired on NBC (possibly just the local Chicago affiliate) during 1949. The episode is available to view on the Internet Archive.
What happened: We are introduced to Walt, a veteran of the building trade, who tells us that he’ll be showing us how to build a sawhorse. The opening video shows some fast-paced carpentry action and tells us that building things are easy once you know what you’re doing. Walt seems hesitant and stumbles through his lines, which makes me a little less confident in the whole endeavor. He does show us that we can balance a chair on two sawhorses, which seems potentially dangerous, but go off king.
Walt starts puffing on a pipe and tells us to get some good material from the lumber yard and cut them to the proper dimensions, which are sort of difficult to read. He advises us to use a square ruler to form a right triangle with the wood. So far things are pretty boring — there’s a lot of measuring and discussion of angles.
The actual sawing starts, and I am immediately worried that this dude is going to cut off a finger. Walt realizes that the television viewer can’t see the lines he’s drawing on the piece of wood, so tries to draw them darker, to little success. He then starts chiseling out pieces of the wood with the knife pointing towards him, but assures us that this is not dangerous.
After musing on the name of the eight-penny nail, Walt pulls out a half-finished version of the sawhorse, and sets about nailing on the last two legs. The next task is to cut out the tray and endpieces. The difficuly begins when Walt starts nailing the endpiece into place on a sawhorse that is “still not too firm.” I swear to god it looks like he hammers his thumb at one point. Still, visible disaster does not occur.
There’s more trouble sawing off the tray section, as the board has started warping. It becomes obvious that the piece isn’t going to fit, so Walt has to make more lines and adjustments. The adjusted piece fits, but it’s still looking rather rickety. With time running out on the episode, Walt hurriedly adds a couple of “reinforcing bars.” He tells us he’ll finish this process later on, and very gingerly sits down on the end of the sawhorse as the camera drifts upwards towards the title.
What I thought: For some reason, I remembered this being discussed as one of the great disasters of the live television era. So I kept expecting something to go terribly wrong — maybe Walt hammers his hand, or the sawhorse collapses as he goes to sit on it. Instead, Walt’s Workshop is a different, quieter kind of disaster, but also one that emphasises how strange and small-scale 1940s television could be.
head out of the frame.
There are times when it feels like anyone could get a TV show in 1949. Walt may be a master builder, but he is certainly not a natural TV presence, with his speech quiet and halting. His slow pace is somewhat soothing, but it also has a pretty obvious limitation, as the program runs out of time before the project is finished.
For full disclosure, I am not handy at all — I probably couldn’t have told you what a sawhorse is before watching this episode. As far as I know, there’s nothing wrong with Walt’s process. Maybe once I’m fully middle-aged I’ll discover a sudden affinity for woodwork and start spending a lot of time at the Home Depot, and I can come back and tell you how useful the information on this program is.
The show isn’t exciting, but it’s possible to see how television could be seen as a valuable way to teach the audience about hands-on skills like this (the cooking show would be a more successful implementation of this idea.) But, to the limited extent there was financial support for educational TV, it was for more high-faluting endeavors like opera broadcasts.
It’s hard to find a lot of contemporary TV parallels to Walt’s Workshop. There are entire networks dedicated to shows about home refurbishment, but they’re mostly about aspirational wealth, with maybe a few shots of handsome guys sawing something. Perhaps the closest thing we have today are YouTube tutorials. Indeed, with a flexible amount of time and an audience more interested in personality than visual excitement, maybe Walt could have gone viral.
Coming up next: Douglas Edwards welcomes us into 1950 with a quick bite of the news.
The Eternal Couch Potato 