16th August 2026
John Wyver writes: The usual Sunday helping of stuff that I have found engaging and enriching over the past week. The header image is of two Hylaeosaurus dinosaurs on the Tidal Lakes Trail in Crystal Palace Park, which we visited last weekend. The recently restored Victorian monsters look wonderful.
• So you want to build an AI star?: a completely fascinating, and disturbing, report by Reggie Ugwu for The New York Times [gift link] about the creation of fake personas on screen…
• Are you a human?: .., and Jill Lepore’s dazzling New Yorker essay [£; limited free access] is the perfect complement.
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15th August 2026
John Wyver writes: Come with me a little further down the rabbit hole that is Studio BB in the original Broadcasting House. This post follows my two-part ‘This temple of the arts and muses’, the first element of which is here and the second here. And it is prompted by the presence of the grand piano in the photos of Studio BB, as below. This is the story of who played that piano for much of the time during the television years of 1932 to 1934. And unlike the majority of posts on this blog it has romance at its heart.
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10th August 2026
John Wyver writes: In my previous post I enthused about Elizabeth Darling’s new book Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922-1932. Here I want to focus on just one aspect that Darling throws some light on, but which I am keen to explore further: the use from August 1932 of Studio BB (above, and in the images below) in the newly constructed BH for regular television transmissions by Baird’s 30-line mechanical system.
BH officially opened on 15 May 1932 (the first transmissions were in March), and little more than two months later, the first of six ‘test’ television broadcasts was made from there, ahead of the official first night of 22 August. Although the standard histories acknowledge Studio BB, it is always described simply as being in the basement with no further details supplied.
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9th August 2026
John Wyver writes: As I manage to do on most Sundays here is a collection of links to stuff that I have found interesting and rewarding over the past week. The header image, which seems suitably seasonal, is ‘Paddling at the beach in Zandvoort’ by the German firm of Knackstedt & Näther, from 1900 – 1905; the image is part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist: Ehsan Khoshbakht’s retrospective for this year’s Locarno Film Festival could not be more timely; I’m not there, but the full and tantalising list of films means I can recreate much of it at home; see also the press release for background, and there is a six-part podcast as well.
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3rd August 2026
John Wyver writes: ‘This Temple of the Arts and Muses’ is the opening phrase of the dedication, displayed in Latin and supposedly written by John Reith, at the entrance to Broadcasting House. Sited on an irregular plot in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus, the BBC’s headquarters was opened in May 1932. Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922-1932 is Elizabeth Darling’s handsome and fascinating study of the building and its contexts..
Beautifully produced by Lund Humphries (albeit hardly a snip at £45), this is a really exceptional book, elegantly written, crammed with information and ideas, and graced with wonderful illustrations. Here I want to draw out some of the elements that I found especially interesting; in a second post, I will focus on the (comparatively little) that the volume has to say about Studio BB, the basement location of the BBC’s 30-line television service which began just three months after the building’s official opening.
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2nd August 2026
John Wyver writes: My usual compendium of links to stuff that this week has caught my eye and engaged my brain. My header image is of Collage for Losing the Garden, 2026, oil on paper, from the glorious exhibition ‘Garden without Seasons’ of recent work by Clare Woods that opened this week (until 8 November) at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery. Beautiful paintings, collages and screenprints, beautifully displayed in beautiful spaces.
I wasn’t sure whether to highlight the Odyssey articles that Bluesky at least has been buzzing about all week. You have probably read some, or all, of them already, but they are so interesting, and I think so revealing about contemporary culture, that I have brought together the key ones.
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31st July 2026
John Wyver writes: When the BBC television service at Alexandra Palace began operations officially on 2 November 1936, Studio A was fitted out with four Emitron electronic cameras supplied by the recently-established joint venture company Marconi-EMI. One or more of these 405-line cameras was mounted on a crude dolly, and so was minimally mobile.
There were two further cameras linked with a pair of film projectors to provide telecine facilities to play in film sequences. And the six vision channels fed into a control room that allowed producers to mix between them. In very basic terms, this is the set-up that television studios have worked with ever since. (The image, from John Swift’s Adventure in Vision, 1950, shows two cameras in the studio for The Importance of Being Earnest, December 1937.)
The mystery is that there appears to have been no model for this configuration. The BBC’s two television studios before this, operational from 1932 to 1935, as well as that used by John Logie Baird’s company before them, were effectively black boxes. Through a hole in one wall a single scanner beam was projected into near-darkness. Reflections from the subject were picked up by photo-electric cells above the beam, and these converted the visual image. Mixing was initially impossible, although it was introduced in a crude manner later with a subsidiary caption card scanner.
At AP, the Baird camera set-up which was installed in Studio B combined a refinement of this ‘spotlight’ scanner system and a fixed internmediate film system. This was quite distinct from, and quickly proved inferior to, the Marconi-EMI set-up. So where did the idea of Marconi-EMI’s 4-plus-2 camera set-up and mixing desk come from?
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28th July 2026
John Wyver writes: In the global scheme of things, the concern I want to highlight this morning is little more than a mote. But apart from the irritation it has provoked, it is a small but potentially significant sign of a shift in the relationship between the BBC’s television channels and BBCiPlayer. It also has implications for the discovery of arthouse films on the corporation’s streaming service.
Until recently, on the Films page for iPlayer there was a ‘Sort by’ dropdown menu with the choices ‘Featured’ / ‘A-Z’ / ‘Recent’. Using this you could rearrange the layout of the features on offer, and by clicking on Recent you could find those films that has been broadcast in the past few days.
This menu remains on, for example, the Drama & Soaps page. but as far as I can see it has disappeared from Films. There, now, ‘Featured’ is the only way in which you can access the catalogue on offer. And ‘Featured’ is structured, much like a streaming service index page, with groupings of films under headings that include ‘Spider-Man’, ‘Family Favourites’, ‘Based on a True Story’, ‘Screen Two’ and ‘Wallace and Gromit’s Wacky World’. We are not so far it seems from Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
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27th July 2026
John Wyver writes: A splendid wedding on Saturday and generally just life got in the way of producing my usual Sunday collection of stuff that has interested me in the past week. So here it is a day late. The header image is a 1916 English landscape by Walter Sickert, Chagford Across Fields, hanging in British Landscapes: A Sense of Place, until 1 November, at Chichester’s Pallant Gallery. I found the show as a whole disappointing, but this is one of its surprising treasures.
• Florentina Holzinger’s naked ambition: an exceptional profile of the Austrian performance artist by Lauren Oyler for The New Yorker [£; limited free access]; I saw Holzinger’s production of Ophelia’s Got Talent last summer in Paris and it has stayed with me in ways that few shows do.
• Pluralistic: daily links from Cory Doctorow: the entirely essential guide to the contemporary world, full of richness about tech and ideas and democracy and more.
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21st July 2026
John Wyver writes: To the ICA on Saturday last for another fascinating programme in Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned series. This has been a revelatory season, shown more or less monthly, of films by Godard and others that, as Witt claims, ‘sheds light on the huge and varied phantom body of unmade and abandoned ventures that lies behind or in the intervals in his completed oeuvre.’
The screenings have been spun off from Michael Witt’s essential book Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, published by Bloomsbury, and now with a comparatively affordable paperback promised for September. Each line-up has been full of rare treasures, and Saturday’s quartet of films loosely themed as ‘History’ was as rich as the other showings that I have been able to get to.
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