OTD in early British television: 16 February 1937
John Wyver writes: In the afternoon and the evening of Tuesday 16 February 1937, Philip Thornton presented the fourth of six talks under the heading The Orchestra and its Instruments. ‘Hybrid Winds’, as the programme was subtitled, featured the perhaps surprising selection of Bulgarian drums and bagpipes, Northumbrian bagpipes and a West African marimba.
This early transmission from AP, just over three months into the service, was a rare example of a Talks programme concerned with music. Pre-war Talks similarly largely ignored literature, but majored on the visual arts and architecture. And then there was the somewhat eccentric choice of host.
Beginning with the new year on 5 January, the series was devised by producer Cecil Lewis, although Mary Adams took it over when he departed for Hollywood. The opening programme on ‘Strings’ and concerned with the origins of the orchestra, featured a similarly cosmopolitan collection of a conch, tzana, lanenrojt and rebab.
In the billing for a later programme, Radio Times provided a little background on Thornton:
He left school at the age of seventeen to write for a Bristol newspaper. But he left journalism to read theology and philosophy at Durham, and after a spell abroad he gave several broadcasts on music, the most notable of which were [The] Musical Switchback, A Traveller in Search of Music, Song and Dance, and Food and Music… Thornton has travelled in almost every part of the world except America, which he hopes to visit shortly.
His radio career began in January 1934 with the twelve-part The Musical Switchback in which he developed an ambitious argument:
… that the tune of ‘ The Blue Danube’, leit-motifs of Wagner and the melodies of Schubert were always in the air. He will support his contentions by giving listeners the opportunity to hear instances of music sometimes uncannily alike, sometimes precisely parallel with each other, that are yet so separated by time or distance as to make conscious or unconscious plagiarism out of the question.
For instance, they will hear a snatch of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony that is identical with a tune from a native instrument of Central Africa; a Javanese song similar to music from the Outer Hebrides ; music of ancient Greece and Persia reappearing again in mediaeval songs.
He followed up in May with A Traveller in Search of Music:
Mr. Thornton is in this new series relating some strange stories of his experiences in search of his materials, and will illustrate his talks as before with songs and tunes played upon his weird musical instruments. His intention is to give as complete a survey of ancient and Eastern music, and its relation to the music we know in Europe, as time permits.
In October 1934 he collaborated with the innovative Talks producer Lionel Fielden [link to Simon Potter’s essay about Fielden and other early mavericks] on Over the Horizon, which gathered numerous witnesses including Freya Stark and Vita Sackville-West in the service of
a journey in speech and sound from London to Baghdad and thence through Persia, following the road northwards by Qasr Shirin and Kermanshah to the shores of the Caspian and returning southwards through Teheran, Isfahan and Shiraz to the Persian Gulf and the oilfields of Masjid-i-Sulaiman, north-east of Basra.
Extensive travels in Morocco led to Song and Dance in February 1935 for the National Programme:
Armed with his flute and tuning fork, he spent the autumn roaming about from one Moorish city to another, in search of musical information for the series he starts today. As usual he has brought back a host of strange instruments, all of which he has mastered-all except one, and he will doubtless tell you about it. It is a very primitive pipe from the Atlas mountains, and although he has noted down quite a dozen tunes for it, it has so far outwitted him.
All of which is to indicate how inventive and innovative radio Talks was in the early 1930s, although as Simon Potter details much of this creativity was stifled later in the decade as the Corporation turned to more popular programming.
Cecil Lewis must have been hoping to bring something of these qualities to the early television service when he brought Thornton on board to write and present The Orchestra and its Instruments. Clearly, the explorer and ethnologist delivered, as this billing for the second programme details:
He will show and describe the functions of modern components of an orchestra such as the bassoon, oboe, clarinet, and flute. Instruments such as these have a long history, and their evolution can be traced by a survey of musical instruments of the past and also those of the present day, some of them weird to Western ears, that are still used in different parts of the world.
Viewers will also see and hear examples of early flutes; the ophicleide; the zurba, which comes from Turkey; the gajas, which comes from Bessarabia; the Bulgarian duduk and kaval; the bansri, which comes from India; and the agwaal, an instrument that is to be found in the Atlas Mountains.
Mary Adams, who came across from radio as AP’s Talks producer, would appear to have been less enamoured of his talents, and The Orchestra and its Instruments remained his only television credit. Nor did Adams pursue other programmes analysing music, with almost the only such broadcasts being conductors Henry Wood and Adrian Boult introducing and then conducting the BBC Television Orchestra in accessible fragments of Beethoven and Delibes.
Discussion of literature was similarly sparse, with the small number of literary talks featuring critic and indefatigable editor Eric Gillett speaking about Dr Johnson and the early modernist scholar G.B. Harrison celebrating O Rare Ben Jonson. Apart from these, talks about drama, poetry and the novel, presumably thought to be done perfectly well by sound broadcasting, did not feature in the schedule. Music, too, Adams must have felt was well-served by the National and Regional Programmes.
Supporting this speculation is the revealing presentation given by Mary Adams in November 1948 (and printed in the Journal of the Royal Society for the Arts), looking back to her work before the war:
Of all the subjects likely to be served best by television, the visual arts hold the most promise… there is reason to hope that television, in time, will accomplish for the visual arts what sound broadcasting has achieved for music.
To television may come credit for raising the general level of artistic appreciation, and reviving in the public a warmer climate of understanding. The detection of visual vulgarity by the viewer and his rejection of ugliness in everyday things, might be the beginning of such understanding
Image: Gerard van Kuijl, ‘A Musical Company’, 1651, for no other reason than that it is a lovely image of musicians and their instruments; courtesy of the great and glorious collection of public domain images that is Rijksmuseum Online.
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