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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8th November 2025
John Wyver writes: Three weeks ago the BBC released a report titled Our BBC, Our Future (link to the report’s home page) which collated responses to an online questionnaire earlier in the year. ‘We asked you to tell us what you think the BBC does well,’ ran the press release, ‘what we could do better, and what you’d like us to focus on in years to come.’ I responded to the questionnaire, along with an 872,700 others, and the results were broadly very positive (link a downloadable summary in English.pdf).
As the report notes,
This is an important moment for the BBC’s future. The next couple of years will decide what the BBC will look like beyond 2027 and how we should best serve our audiences.
And there are frequent self-interested and profoundly ignorant and attacks on the BBC, the most recent of which Michael Savage highlighted yesterday for the Guardian. While it is very far from perfect, and while I have a specific issue with one aspect of the corporation’s operation, the BBC remains vital to the social, political and culture life of this country. A future without it is unimaginable. So why am I so irritated and frustrated by the report?
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7th November 2025
John Wyver writes: Some of you will know that I have been very involved over the past months with attempts to reverse the wrong-headed changes to access at the BBC Written Archives Centre (above, with thanks to Ian Greaves for the photo). This is an ongoing campaign, and I thought it might be useful here to outline its progress with a clutch of links. The following will hopefully give you a sense of why this is so important for independent research into not only broadcasting history but the social, political and cultural histories of Britain and the empire across the past century.
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6th November 2025
John Wyver writes: After yesterday’s post about Television Comes to London, let’s stay in the first week of the official high definition television from Alexandra Palace, and turn our attention to the afternoon of Friday 6 November 1936. This was when the cast and producer of Marigold travelled to AP to present scenes from their West End production before the somewhat intractable Baird transmission set-up in and alongside Studio B.
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5th November 2025
John Wyver writes: The high definition television service from Alexandra Palace was just three days old on Bonfire Night 1936. That afternoon, after a performance under the name of the Mercury Ballet of Marie Rambert’s dance company, the film documentary made to mark the opening of the AP television station was broadcast for the second time.
The 18-minute Television Comes to London had been broadcast at the start of the week, and it was to become such a fixture in the early schedules that viewers and commentators complained about its ubiquity. It is nonetheless a fascinating document, a not-too-great but still welcome prijnt of which can be accessed here.
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4th November 2025
John Wyver writes: One of the wall-size blow-ups in the NPG’s current Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World exhibition is one a well-dressed young woman, seen from behind, looking into the wartime ruins of Middle Temple (above). Nearby is a silver gelatin print of image, immaculately mounted and framed, and with an informative caption. The title is ‘Fashion is Indestructible’, with the descriptive addition ‘Elizabeth Cowell in suit by Digby Morton’, and the date is 1941, during the captial’s Blitz.
The presentation is typical of a show that, despite the disappointing corridor-like ground-floor galleries that stress the temporary quality of temporary exhibitions, is mounted with flair and even flamboyance. (Contrast this with the austere line-of-postage-stamps presentation of Tate Britain’s current Lee Miller display.) At the NPG there are gorgeous images, as both vintage prints and striking murals, that are frequently pleasing, often dazzling and always, but always, beautiful.
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