On screen

It was ignored by the Party and the country's leaders, but the TV news started exactly 50 years ago in Hungary, at the dawn of the Kadar era.

A remarkable career began in April 1957 in front of the Corvin Department Store in Budapest. Seeing a flickering TV screen, a 33-year-old young woman decided to accept an offer made to her three days before by a TV producer, becoming a TV news producer. That's how Ms Jozsef Matuz remembers the beginning of her career in interviews. At the beginning, she was in charge of putting together a weekly 10-minute broadcast, before running the TV news for three decades, until the end of 1985. By this time, she was running an operation that produced three bulletins daily and was put together by a team of hundreds.

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It's still not clear who decided in 1954 that that Magyar Radio should set up a TV news department, and nor does anybody know why Matuzne was chosen to put it together. It is in any case a fact that the young woman (then a civil servant at the Ministry for Popular Education), who had a teachers' diploma, was better qualified than her then and later bosses. She spoke two languages tolerably and her party and trade union activities must have been reassuring to the people who appointed her. Initially, the news broadcasts were taken from cinema newsreels. On 2 July 1957, the Picture News she edited replaced the newsreels. The TV was then operating from four or five rooms in the Stock Exchange Palace on Szabadsag ter. Her team had to work with primitive equipment. They had a single, vast film camera, and on-location broadcasts had to be put together days in advance. A voice track had to be added later, in a time-consuming synchronisation process. The alternative - which everyone preferred - was to take the film reel up to the studio on Szabadsag Hill (today's Szechenyi Hill), where the announcer would read out the text live.

The TV news's position was far from secure. Hungarian Radio and Television's (MRT) management was not sure they wanted anything like this. In 1958 there was even talk of axing the TV news to save money. Things changed when the former textiles worker Laszlo Gacs was chosen to head MRT. He had been a leader of the Communist Party when it was an illegal organisation during the war, and it was his decision to go from one weekly broadcast to two.

This was not welcome. The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party's(MSZMP) leadership, partly because they were not keen on new technology, were not dazzled by the possibilities offered by television. For example, the MSZMP's political committee was most interested in the radio when they discussed electronic media in October 1959. Party leaders talked at length about the programmes they themselves listened to. Gyorgy Marosan told Gacs that "he would be glad to get up several times in the morning" if he could wake up to the Workers' Chorus. Janos Kadar said he would be glad if the radio report Gyula Gulyas would "show some excitement" when reporting on a match. They said nothing about TV schedules, even though there were already some 200,000 viewers in the country.

Only Antal Apro, first deputy of the ministerial council, showed any interest in the future of television, pointing out that in Moscow, "Comrade Mishkoyan has recommended that television should not be seen as a consumer good like a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine, as we have done for years, but as one of the important tools available to the political leadership." Kadar interpreted this as meaning that televisions should be sold more cheaply. No decision was taken, however, and even in the first half of the 1960s, Hungary had the highest licence fee, four times that of the Soviet Union, where TV broadcasts became free after three years of paying. The fee in Hungary was Ft50 a month, compared to an average monthly income of Ft1200 - equivalent to Ft4500 today, when the average monthly wage is Ft110,000. The Ft405m earned from the licence fee in 1964 would have been enough to build a planned new TV headquarters twice over - yet nothing was done. At the time, the cheapest televisions cost Ft5200.