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OTDs to date in early British television: dance

28th March 2025

John Wyver writes: 28 March appears to be another unremarkable date in each year of pre-war television, and as a consequence it offers the opportunity to compile another subject index to my 113 original posts to date. The format is similar to my earlier one highlighting posts about early television drama, listing the posts in chronological order of subject, except that the focus of this one is dance from ballet to ballroom.

As before, these daily blog posts are intended to run until the publication at the start of 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain. For fuller indexes of previous posts go here for February posts, here for January ones, and here for ones in December (and the end of November).

1933

• OTD in early British television: 22 February 1933: the melancholy tale of dancer and acrobat Laurie Devine (header image, and below) who appeared multiple times in 30-line broadcasts.

• OTD in early British television: 15 March 1933: the celebrated dancer Adeline Genée gave her farewell performance by television, which was the first great ballet coup for the producer of the BBC’s 30-line transmissions, Eustace Robb.

• OTD in early British television: 5 December 1933: the first of two appearances by the then 28-year-old Agnes de Mille, the great American dancer and Broadway choreographer.

1935

• OTD in early British television: 16 January 1935: a broadcast with prima ballerina Lydia Sokolova and Harold Turner, both important figures in the history of British dance.

1937

• OTD in early British television: 2 March 1937: one of television’s most innovative pre-war programmes, Fugue for Four Cameras was a strikingly experimental six-minute dance collaboration created by producer Stephen Thomas with choreographer Antony Tudor.

• OTD in early British television: 8 December 1937: a Christmas-themed ballroom dancing demonstration by Alex Moore and Pat Kilpatrick (above).

• OTD in early British television: 13 December 1937: the most ambitious television ballet to date, act 2 of, as it was billed, Le lac des cygnes, or Swan Lake to the rest of us. The troupe was the Vic-Wells Ballet Company, from which chrysalis the Royal Ballet would emerge post-war.

1938

• OTD in early British television: 5 January 1938: the fascinating and unexpected story Ragini Devi (above), appearing on Picture Page as ‘Indian dancer’ performing a Marwari dance.

• OTD in early British television: 7 February 1938: an original short ballet for the screen, The Three Bears, choreographed by Joy Newton.

• OTD in early British television: 25 March 1938: Ballet Rambert’s Bar Aux Folies-Bergère (below), with Elizabeth Schooling dancing the role of ‘La Fille au Bar’, and with William Chappell‘s costumes and setting.

1939

• OTD in early British television: 9 February 1939: an especially eclectic line-up for an edition of Contrasts curated by artist Pearl Binder, with dancers from Java and Bali performing Japanese classical dance, and dances by Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jewish refugee who had been a pupil of modernist dance pioneer Mary Wigman.