OTD in early British television: 2 May 1935
John Wyver writes: Ninety years ago tonight, on Thursday 2 May 1935, Ivor Novello‘s musical Glamorous Night premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The first nighters were enthralled and the box office registered exceptionally healthy sales. The show’s success led to the actor and composer beginning a series of lavish, operetta-style presentations, although this is the only one in which television has a central role.
Wikipedia has the basics about the show and its successors:
For all his four 1930s musicals, Novello (above) wrote the book and music, Christopher Hassall wrote the lyrics, and the orchestrations were by Charles Prentice. Glamorous Night starred Novello and Mary Ellis, with a cast including Zena Dare, Olive Gilbert and Elizabeth Welch, and ran from 2 May 1935 to 18 July 1936, at Drury Lane and then the London Coliseum.
Elsewhere, we can find the synopsis, :
A young inventor, Anthony Allen [played initially by Novello], has created a working television but has not had much success in promoting it. The head of a radio broadcasting company fears competition and pays Allen to suppress his invention. Allen takes a luxury cruise to the “Ruritanian” kingdom of Krasnia in Central Europe.
There he sees an operetta, Glamorous Nights, starring the [Romany] princess Militza Hajos, the prima-donna of the state opera. He meets the star and learns that she is betrothed to the King of Krasnia. Allen saves her from an assassin and, after she flees the country aboard his cruise ship, he rescues her from a shipwreck caused by another assassination plot. They soon fall in love.
Meanwhile, the [Romanies] side with the King to overcome a revolution and also promote the reunion of Militza and King Stefan. Brokenhearted, Anthony gives her up, for the good of the kingdom. The king finances Anthony’s invention. Back in England, Allen watches the king’s wedding to Militza on his television.
The settings, including what was apparently a truly spectacular and frightening shipwreck, were created by Oliver Messel, but try as I might I can find no photograph of the final scene with Allen watching the wedding on television. Writing for The Era critic Leslie Rees was impressed:
The big-scale impression of a television performance at the end of the play is also artfully engineered, and has its ironic interest in addition.
And for George Warrington filing presciently for Country Life, the show’s ‘thread of philosophic argument’ was that ‘television will show us that people, like things, are not always what they seem.’
The inclusion of television was clearly conceived to respond to the intense anticipation of the medium in the spring of 1935. The BBC was continuing to offer the modest 30-line service, but this was over-shadowed at this moment by the alluring promise, following the release of the Selsdon Report in January, of a high-definition service. Even so, London would have to wait another 18 months before the official start of transmissions from Alexandra Palace.
In an engaging blog post about the show Malcolm Baird points out that his father John Logie Baird had demonstrated large-screen television on the stage of the Coliseum in 1930 and by 1935 was working on large screen colour television. He continues:
It is not on record that anyone in our family ever went to see the show. My mother might have been interested but she was expecting a baby (me!). At this time, my father’s company was working to upgrade its television systems for the competition for the first high definition television on the B.B.C. But in January 1937 the all-electronic Marconi-EMI 405 line system was adopted.
The success of Glamorous Night is an indication of the grip that television had on the public imagination. A few years later it was made into a film, but the television connection was quietly written out of the script, with Anthony Allen’s occupation being changed from inventor to newspaper reporter. The film industry was getting nervous about television and this was fully justified by the disastrous impact of television on cinema attendance after World War II.
Image credit: George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: LC-DIG-ggbain-36080).
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