OTD in early British television: 31 December 1938
John Wyver writes: New Year’s Eve 1938 saw one of BBC Television’s two outside broadcast units parked round the corner from Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane. For 35 minutes from 11.30pm, from the swanky ballroom there Leslie Mitchell hosted a broadcast billed as Seeing the New Year In! A pair of press accounts suggest that a good time was had by all those present, apart perhaps from the camera operators marooned amidst a sea of partying swells.
For the Daily Telegraph, ‘our radio correspondent’ reported that the programme was
one of the most difficult television feats yet accomplished. A camera mounted on a trolley was launched onto the dance floor, where hundreds of jubilant revellers surged round and vied with one another in the new sport of ‘camera crashing’ to wave or perform a pas seul for the unseen audience. BBC producers formed a ring round the camera aand struggled good-humouredly to keep a space clear for legitimate aspirants to be interviewed…
I was at the camera end for once. Viewers report that the gaiety, as conveyed by television, was thoroughly infectious, and for a piece of entirely unreheased realism it would have been hard to beat. The climax was rached when Sidney Lipton and his band formed the head of a ‘crocodile’ and the whole company trooped round the floor to welcome in 1939.
Also present was Jonah Barrington, who had the television beat for the Daily Express, and whose style was a little more florid:
Magnificent to watch the BBC officials – arms linked like policemen – fighting back the dancers from the cameras. Curious to note the congestion wherever the cameras pointed, said congestion shifting round in a a solid pohalanx as the cameras shifted.
Stimulating to watch Leslie Mitchell and the BBC’s Mr Cox crawling on hands and knees directing the cameras. Delightful to see frivolous-minded girls tickling their augist heads with teasers – much to the detriment of duty.
At about 11.50pm Barrington was summoned:
A man came up and said: ‘You’re wanted’. A vast pushing and shoving (with my wife clinging behind), a sudden clearance, the cameras, then —
Leslie Mitchell, interviewer, is looking stern. ‘Mr Barrington,’ he says, ‘we’re tired of reading your criticisms. We now demand that you do something creative yourself. You shall sing “A Ticket, a Tasket”. Your wife and I shall be the critics. Here’s the microphone…
Sid Lipton’s band strikes up the opening bars, I open a parched mouth, and… [ellipses in the original] By the time I came to, it is 1939. I can only hope (for once) that you haven’t a television set.
It’s a good story, even if Barrington failed to mention that, according to the Programme-as-Broadcast form, he performed the song as a duet. Or that his singing partner was L. Marsland Gander, ‘our radio correspondent’ for the Daily Telegraph, who similarly made no reference to the presence of his Fleet Street colleague. Heaven forfend that, even in the glow of New Year goodwill, a pressman should mention a journalist from a rival rag.
Image: a somewhat idealised image of the Grosvenor House Ballroom in the 1930s from the Facebook page of JW Marriott Grosvenor House London.
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