20th January 2026
John Wyver writes: Sunday on BBC Four and BBC iPlayer saw the start of a thrilling season of classic dramas by, and documentaries about, Henrik Ibsen. The full programme, to be broadcast over the coming weeks, is now available for streaming for the next eleven months (and hopefully with an extension), and there are riches galore. The offerings come from five decades from 1953 onwards, and some are true rarities; a number of the productions have not previously been accessible since transmission; and there is at least one remarkable restoration.
Those appearing on screen include Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Ingrid Bergman, Michael Gambon, Kenneth Branagh, Juliet Stevenson, Jenny Agutter, Patrick McGoohan and many more. Production talent includes Waris Hussein, Elijah Moshinsky and David Thacker. For viewers interested in television drama and theatre history, this is a peak ‘high art’ offering. So given that television these days provides few such cultural treats, why is the corporation not making more of a fuss of this?
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19th January 2026
John Wyver writes: To BFI Southbank yesterday for an accidental double bill. I hadn’t planned it this way, but it happened that I watched Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes, 1938 (above), just before the silent High Treason, 1929, the third programme in the Magic Rays of Light season. I’m not sure there are any parallels between the two, beyond the fact that both made for exceptional cinema experiences.
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18th January 2026
John Wyver writes: The usual weekly round-up of some of the stuff that has engaged and interested me over the past week; more literary than some weeks, and with much, mostly cultural, from across the Atlantic, but with some strong film and television links too.
• Erich von Stroheim’s spectacular art is back: cued by a reconstruction and restoration of Queen Kelly (above) by Milestone Films playing in New York, the estimable Richard Brody for The New Yorker [£; limited free access] reflects on the career of its curator; see also Nicholas Rapold’s review for The New York Times [gift link]
• 10 great filmmaker biopics: tied to the imminent release of Richard Linklater’s glorious Nouvelle Vague, this list by Miriam Balanescu has some strong, slightly off-the-wall suggestions.
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16th January 2026
John Wyver writes: The successful series of screenings at BFI Southbank continues on Sunday, 18 January, with the first of three programmes of British feature films that offer imagined versions of television at its start. First up is the silent version of High Treason (above), a science fiction drama directed by Maurice Elvey, which will be presented with piano accompaniment by John Sweeney. A few tickets are still available. Reproduced here is the programme note that I have compiled for the event.
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14th January 2026
John Wyver writes: The BFI Southbank season continues tomorrow, Thursday 15 January, with an early evening screening in NFT2 of two remarkable programmes. First is a 1970 edition of the BBC2 arts magazine series Review which features a recreation of the 30-line broadcast from 1930 of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. The original production team are reunited forty years after the original transmission to give a unique insight into the making of early television.
Following this is Jack Rosenthal’s 1986 drama The Fools on the Hill, a loving, comic (and highly inaccurate) imagining of events at Alexandra Palace leading up to the first night of the BBC’s high definition service on 2 November 1936.
I’ll be providing an introduction and tickets are still available. Meanwhile, following is the text of the programme note that I have written for the evening. And the image above pairs Pat Whitmore as Adele Dixon from The Fools on the Hill with the real deal in Television Comes to London.
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13th January 2026
John Wyver writes: Taking a break from posts about Magic Rays of Light, I am delighted to highlight another article of mine that has just been published in the latest edition of VIEW: Journal of European Television and Culture.
Online and fully open access, issue no 28 collects a rich group of exceptional contributions under the title, ‘With and Against the Grain: Creative Dialogues with Broadcast Archives’. And my essay, which is illustrated with a couple of archive extracts and a number of framegrabs, revisits the 2021 film Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain that I made for BBC Four with Todd MacDonald, Ian Cross and Helen Wheatley.
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12th January 2026
John Wyver writes: Tonight in the Reuben Library at BFI Southbank, I am in conversation with BFI Television Curator Lisa Kerrigan talking about, of course, Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of British Television, which was published on Thursday. There are still a few tickets left.
In all of the blog posts I have been contributing about this, I have not yet shared the central arguments of the book, and it is these that I outline here in this extract from the Introduction. Also briefly noted are two of the key characters in the book, critic Grace Wyndham Goldie and 30-line producer Eustace Robb (above). I spend most of the time on the book’s first proposition, and will return to the other four in future posts.
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11th January 2026
John Wyver writes: too much politics today perhaps, but it’s been that kind of a week; otherwise there are a couple of great film links and a terrific AI essay, along with other articles well worth your time. This week’s image is Fernard Léger’s great 1937 mural Le Transport des Forces, which I admired greatly at the Fernand Léger National Museum at Biot this past summer.
• Film Studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy – Architecture, Innovation, Labour, Politics, 1930-60s: in addition to my Magic Rays of Light, on Thursday Bloomsbury published this substantial and exceptional volume edited by Sarah Street and six other scholars; thrillingly – thanks to funding from the European Research Council – it’s entirely free to download.
• Talking about Wajda…: Michael Brooke’s Substack postings about central and eastern European cinema are already proving to be essential, so do subscribe; this one is especially good, about his experience in creating commentary tracks for Andrzej Wajda’s The War Trilogy; note also that BFI Southbank has a major Wajda retrospective next month.
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8th January 2026
John Wyver writes: Publication day! And just in time, my copies of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain arrived yesterday. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I am thrilled. The book feels substantial but not (I hope) intimidating; the photographs have reproduced well; I really like the lay-out, the font and the weight of the paper; and the cover, with a detail of Harry Rutherford’s Starlight, 1937, looks gorgeous.
Tonight we start a season of screenings at BFI Southbank, and on Monday evening in the BFI Reuben Library I am discussing the book with Television Curator Lisa Kerrigan; there are still some tickets available. Today, in part because this is the kind of information that is rarely made public, I thought I would sketch what it has cost me to get to this point.
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7th January 2026
John Wyver writes: The Magic Rays of Light season at BFI Southbank kicks off tomorrow night, Thursday 8, with a programme of four documentaries made for the early television service. On what is also publication day for the book (and when I might finally see a copy), I am introducing the programme and have written the accompanying notes, which I thought, despite it making for a long post, it might be interesting to reproduce here.
If you fancy coming there are still tickets, and you’ll see the muffin man above from Picture Page as well as much, much more, but at the time of writing the website is showing only 9 seats available.
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