OTD in early British television: 23 June 1939
John Wyver writes: Just before 10.30pm on Friday 23 June 1939, pianist Phyllis Sellick closed out the evening transmission from AP with ‘Jeux d’eau’ by Ravel and Liszt’s ‘La Campanella’ arranged by Ferruccio Busoni. Programmes by this point shut down each night with a short presentation of soothing music. After ten previous Piano Interludes, which had started at the end of March, this was Phyllis Sellick’s final television appearance before the war.
A celebrated pianist and teacher, known in particular for her commitment to modern British composers including Vaughan Williams, Michaedl Tippett and Lennox Berkeley, Sellick continued to work into her tenth decade, dying at the age of 95 in 2007. Five years before this, she appeared on Desert Island Discs, which can be heard here.
Phyllis Sellick was also well-known for being half of a duo with her husband Cyril Smith, who she married in 1937 (and they were on the Desert Island Discs together 40 years before her solo turn). Smith had made his concert debut in 1929, but finding bookings hard to come by, he took what he later described as a ‘bread-and-butter’ job with the Baird television company to play for their early 30-line broadcasts.
‘The firm,’ he recalled, ‘then very new and amateurish, wanted an accompanist to provide a background to the strange entertainment which they put on.’ Smith had few illusions about the musical taste of the tiny number of committed viewers, who
were more concerned about whether the sound reproduced well, and whether the blurred, jumpy picture on the screen could be recognised as a man at a piano.
Producer Harold Bradly, however, was pleased to showcase Smith on screen, as he enthused:
Perhaps one of the most fascinating pictures which the “extended scene” [a shot of the full-length figure] has made possible, is what would otherwise be a very tame item from the television point of view – a pianoforte solo. Even if one has not an ear for music one cannot fail to be interested in watching the movements of the hands along the keyboard as seen on the television screen.
Smith continued his relationship with television when the BBC took over the 30-line service, and then after 1936 played regularly at Alexandra Palace. His meeting with Phyllis Sellick is charmingly described by John Amis in his Guardian obituary of her:
Cyril described his first sight of a “dazzlingly pretty girl, aged about 15, tall and slim, with a halo of golden hair!” A prodigiously gifted young virtuoso pianist, he was two years older than her. Eventually, he found out her name and wrote to her, suggesting they play duets together. Her reply was prompt and to the point: “No.”
But chance brought them together during an audition at the BBC television studios at Alexandra Palace, north London. Soon, they were hiking together at weekends, trying out walks suggested in the previous Friday’s Evening News. Their feet soon got off the ground as they became ardent bicyclists: and, in 1937, they married.
Sellick and Smith performed together at the Royal Albert Hall during the 1941 Proms, and their later professional life is sketched by Wikipedia:
In 1956, Smith lost the use of his left hand following a stroke. In 1957, Selik and Smith made their first BBC appearance as a three-hand piano duo playing two pianos. In the following years, Gordon Jacob and Malcolm Arnold wrote works for the duo: Malcolm’s Concerto For Phyllis And Cyril was premiered to great acclaim at the 1969 Proms.
[Lennox] Berkeley adapted his concerto for piano four hands, which he had composed for them, for three-hands, and Bliss also arranged his concerto for two pianos. In total, twenty major and more than one hundred minor works were arranged for the three-hand duo. A few months before Smith’s death in 1974, he and Sellik recorded César Franck’s Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue.
Image: Signed photograph of Phyllis Sellick and Cyril Smith, for sale online for a modest $45 via Tamino Autographs.
[OTD post no. 188; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
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