OTD in early British television: 18 April 1939
John Wyver writes: Television’s treat on the evening of Tuesday 18 April 1939 was the third Coliseum Night presenting the first half of the variety bill at Sir Oswald Stoll’s flagship theatre in London’s St Martin’s Lane. Featured artists included The Damora Dancers, comedians Mooney and Dawe, and a parade of solo artists among which were singers Betty Driver (‘Blue skies are around the corner’; later Betty Williams in Coronation Street) and Bertha Willmott (‘Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow’), and comedienne Yvonne Arnaud.
Two years on from the modest daytime ‘local OB’ from the railway siding adjacent to Alexandra Palace, which was featured in yesterday’s post, the Television service could mount a remote evening transmission from a cavernous auditorium, albeit with additional lighting brought in for the broadcast. ‘To put over the excellent pictures which we see is a remarkable technical feat,’ applauded the Observer’s ‘E.H.R.’
By this point experienced entrepreneur Oswald Stoll had a complex history with broadcasting. He had invited John Logie Baird to present his technology as an attraction on a variety bill in the summer of 1930, and he had briefly flirted with permitting radio broadcasts from his halls. In January 1939, he welcomed the BBC’s OB unit for a transmission of part of the show Doorlay’s Christmas Rocket (pictured above).
In The Listener Grace Wyndham Goldie enthused about the broadcast which she felt was
enormously more satisfactory in every way than most of the studio variety I have seen. There was the pleasure of seeing the real thing; there was terrific punch, drive and gusto: there were turns of very high quality which might have been made for television, among them Johnny Riscoe’s miming and Carter’s brilliant card tricks and Joe Young’s patter.
The camera could concentrate on a single performance without making us feel that we were missing something elsewhere. And when we were given ‘ long shots ‘ they were of choruses and ensembles when we did not need an impression from individuals.
Stoll clearly felt similarly, and in early February the Daily Telegraph carried the news that 21 February would see the first of a monthly series of visits to the Coliseum. As the paper reported,
Sir Oswald Stoll said yesterday that he believes television can help the theatre as much as the theatre can help television.
Having praised the technical quality of April’s edition, ‘E.H.R’ was less certain than both Stoll and his critic colleague Wyndham Goldie about the worth of the project:
We must seriously question whether this kind of thing is good television entertainment. The performers are ‘filling’ an enormous auditorium and the close-up pictures that we see of them yelling at the tops of their voices and exaggerating every gesture tend to be distressing.
Artists like Bertha Wilmott (sic) and Yvonne Arnaud get away with it because they are geniuses in their own line. The supply of geniuses is, unfortunately, very limited.
As an added treat, here’s a wonderful clip with Bertha Willmott performing for airplane factory workers from Sidney Gilliatt and Frank Launder’s Millions Like Us (1943). The opening tracking shot is astonishing, look at the size of that canteen, and Patricia Roc is, as so often, sublime. She has just learned that her husband Fred has been killed in a bombing raid over Germany; ‘Waiting at the church’ was played at their wedding reception.
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