30th November 2025
John Wyver writes: Another collection of articles and a video that have engaged me this week, embracing politics and the visual arts, melodrama, children’s television, PTA and Pynchon, neolithic monuments and a modernist lido, building Jerusalem in post-war Britain, the future of photography, close reading, and the hideousness of the Epstein elite.
Several of the links were suggested by friends and colleagues, for which thanks. I wasn’t sure what image to use this week, so I’ve simply chosen a favourite painting that I encountered in the Manchester Art Gallery earlier in the year: ‘New Street’, 1956, by Harry Kingsley. I am particularly fond of the television aerial.
• Surrealism against fascism: first up, a remarkable and essential essay by Naomi Klein for Equator about Gaza, fascism, Walter Benjamin, Surrealism, André Breton, Zohran Mamdani and much more:
We’re beginning to glimpse what fascism looks like amid the wreckage of history, with all its ironies and absurdities. But an urgent question remains unanswered: what, in that same wreckage, might antifascism look like? We cannot look to the past for easy answers, since the past has changed us in such fundamental ways. But we can look for clues – including to an antifascist movement of artists and philosophers in which Benjamin himself reserved a special kind of hope.
• Tightrope of hope: … and then the new LRB [£; limited free access] also has a rich essay about Surrealism and resistance to fascism, in this case by Hal Foster, who reviews with his characteristic thoughtfulness Surrealism and Anti-fascism: Anthology edited by Karin Althaus, Adrian Djukić, Ara H. Merjian, Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber.
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28th November 2025
John Wyver writes: Between an appearance by the ventriloquist D’Anselmi and a short programme called The Accompanist Speaks, with pianist Ivor Newton, television’s main offering on the evening of Monday 28 November 1938 was the second edition (above) of the series Guest Night. Host A.G. Street, who was a noted author and farmer as well as a regular broadcaster, and producer Mary Adams gathered together five distinguished figures to discuss houses – ‘what they should look like inside and out, their arrangement in cities, and their place in the country’.
Assembled in a studio set of a well-appointed and comfortable drawing room were Merlin Minshall, Serge Chermayeff, Duncan Miller, John Gloag and Maxwell Fry. Discussion programmes featuring multiple participants were Adams’ innovation and still very much a novelty, and like almost all other Talks programmes of the time, this would have been carefully pre-scripted, here by Michael Spender (who may be the explorer and brother of poet Stephen and artist Humphrey).
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27th November 2025
John Wyver writes: As noted earlier in the week, I have curated a screening season at BFI Southbank in January to tie in with the publication by Bloomsbury and the BFI of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain. Two of the programmes, to which I will contribute introductions, are of documentaries from the 1930s and ’40s, together with Jack Rosenthal’s drama about Alexandra Palace, The Fools on the Hill. I will return to the play in another post, and also to the three programmes of 1930s’ feature films, but here I want to highlight the documentaries that will have a rare outing on a big screen.
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26th November 2025
John Wyver writes: ‘What’s language, mummy?’ a small boy asks actor Marina Vlady (above,. top) playing a waking Juliette Jeanson in Jean-Luc Godard’s Wild Palms, the world premiere of which was held at London’s ICA last night.
More accurately, the occasion was the first realisation of the late filmmaker’s ‘proposition’ for an adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, which was first published in 1939 as The Wild Palms. As Wikipedia says, ‘The book consists of two different stories, told in non-linear fashion in alternating chapters, which contain both parallels and contrasts.’
In his foundational 1967 study Richard Roud reported that Godard envisaged an interlaced showing of his films Made in USA (1966) and Two or Three Things That I Know About Her (1967), ‘first a reel of Made in USA, then a reel of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, then a reel of Made in USA, etc., just as Faulkner mixed two stories in The Wild Palms. That would be his adaptation of the novel.’
And thanks to the ICA cinema team, juggling complex projection and live subtitling, and to Michael Witt, season curator and author of Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, newly published by Bloomsbury, the proposition was experienced for the first time, from fine 35mm prints, by a lucky few who filled ICA Cinema 1 for three revelatory hours.
(Michael Witt’s ICA season Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned continues on 9 December with Literary Adaptation 1: Guy de Maupassant, and then into the first months of 2026.)
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25th November 2025
John Wyver writes: After a lengthy hiatus and posts concerned with other matters, we need to return our attention to the pre-war television schedules. So let’s look back 88 years to Thursday 25 November 1937 when the high definition service was just a year and three weeks old. At 15.01 that day, and again at 21.14, the schedule featured short outside broadcasts from the Elstree film studios. This was day three of a four-day visit, following earlier outings that autumn to Pinewood and Denham.
On Thursday afternoon film star Aileen Marson (above), standing in for a billed Elsa Lanchester, accompanied Leslie Mitchell and four pressmen on a tour round a quartet of sets to look at aspects of scenic design. According to the Programme-as-Broadcast form, they saw ‘a snow scene in Russia’, ‘a scene in a Persian market’, ‘an English street scene in pouring rain’, and ‘a London street scene in a fog’. That evening director Albert de Courville and actor Albert Burdon was interviewed by Freddie Grisewood against a background of the final shots of their comedy Oh Boy!.
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24th November 2025
John Wyver writes: Exciting news just released by the British Film Institute: throughout January BFI Southbank has a season of documentaries and early feature films linked to the publication of my monograph Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, published by Bloomsbury and the BFI on 8 January.
As regulars here will know, later in the month, on 26 January, we celebrate the centenary of the first public presentation of what John Logie Baird called ‘true television’, at his laboratory above what is now Bar Italia in Frith Street.
Once the BFI brochure for January is out, I’ll post further details of the screening and dates, together with a note about my BFI Reuven Library talk on Monday 12 January, and also booking details. Meanwhile, here is the text from the BFI’s announcement at the end of last week:
… to celebrate the centenary of television, we present the short season Magic Rays of Light: Early Television which looks at the very earliest years of the medium. Curated by John Wyver, author of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, the programme will include Television Arrives!, which features three documentaries made by the BBC to showcase pre-war television from Alexandra Palace and a fourth that marked the service re-opening in June 1946.
Other screenings include The Fools in the Hill (David Giles, 1986, BBC), Jack Rosenthal’s loving, comic recreation of the television service at Alexandra Palace as it prepared for opening night in November 1936, plus dramatic depictions of early television on film including Maurice Elvey’s British sci-fi thriller High Treason (1929), Will Hay playing a lightly disguised Lord Reith in Radio Parade of 1935 (Arthur B. Wood, 1934), the head of the broadcasting organisation NBG occupying an Art Deco premises clearly modelled on the BBC’s New Broadcasting House, and Adrian Brunel and Alfred Hitchcock’s Elstree Calling (1930), a lavish musical film designed as a British version of the Hollywood Revues in which Tommy Handley introduces an array of comedy and musical sketches, linked by acts presented in a television broadcast.
23rd November 2025
John Wyver writes: Welcome to a selection of writing on television, film, visual art, the politics of images, dance and poems that I found stimulating over the past week. The image above is a detail of Wayne Thiebaud’s painting ‘Cup of Coffee’, 1961, on view in the highly recommended exhibition Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life at the Courtauld Gallery until 18 January. Seeing the show recently, and loving it, I felt a strikingly strong urge to steal this small, exquisite canvas.
• The BBC is under threat like never before. This is how to save it: urgent from Pat Younge in the Guardian;; Younge is Chair of British Broadcasting Challenge, which has issued an important report, Renewing the BBC: A New Charter for Britain and the World, which can be downloaded here.
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16th November 2025
John Wyver writes: welcome to the end of an extraordinary week, which is reflected somewhat in today’s selection of stuff that has engaged me in the past seven days; but there are also recommendations about television, film, literature and history that might perhaps help you forget what a grim world this too often seems to be.
One ‘housekeeping’ note: we migrated our server this past week, which is why the blog posts have been infrequent. But all seems to have gone well with the process, so we should be back to a regular schedule from now on.
• Inside the BBC’s Gaza fiasco: absolutely exceptional reporting and analysis by Daniel Trilling for the new online venture Equator; essential background to the week’s turmoil at the corporation; also very well worth reading are Crisis at the BBC – the long view by David Hendy, and Alan Rusbridger’s The real threat to the BBC’s impartiality for Prospect.
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10th November 2025
John Wyver writes: Some six weeks ago I posted a Call for Proposals for a one-day symposium about the films of the important documentary maker Robert Vas (above). My colleagues James Jordan and Eleni Liarou and I have received a number of really interesting proposals, but scheduling issues have meant that we have had to bring forward the date of the symposium, which will now be held on Friday 27 March.
Along with this change, we felt that it might be useful to extend the deadline for proposals to Monday 8 December, and we really hope that other scholars and filmmakers will be interested in putting forward ideas for papers.
We are keen to set Vas’ films in a broad range of contexts, and so we welcome thoughts about distinctive documentary engagements with the themes that drove his work: refugee experience, Jewish culture, the film archive, memory and history. Do click through to the revised CFP for more details.
We feel certain that the day will be a rich and stimulating mix of presentations and extracts from Vas’ work, and we look forward to sharing the full programme in the new year and to welcoming attendees to Birkbeck’s very fine cinema in London’s Gordon Square.
Incidentally, as I was working on this I found a blog post about access to the films of Robert Vas that I wrote back in June 2013 which remains as pertinent today as it was then.
9th November 2025
John Wyver writes: As part of the overall re-boot of the blog, let’s see together whether it is interesting once again to share a dozen recommendations from my reading (mostly) and viewing (minimally) this past week. For new readers, this is an ancient Sunday morning ritual that I am considering re-instating on a regular basis.
• 10-minute challenge: a modern master takes us inside an artist’s studio: I am a huge fan of The New York Times‘ focus challenges, and this latest one composed by Larry Buchanan focuses on Kerry James Marshall’s huge 2014 ‘Untitled (Studio)’, reproduced above; see this and much more of this great artist’s work in the current exhibition at the Royal Academy.
See also Can you stare at a work of art for 10 minutes?, a report by Sarah Bahr on the first year of the ’10-minute challenge’ initiative.
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