OTD in early British television: 31 July 1935
John Wyver writes: The late-night 45-minute broadcast in the BBC’s low-definition television service on Wednesday 31 July 1935 promised ‘an illustrated natural history talk’. And indeed the Zoological Society’s Dr David Seth-Smith, curator of mammals and birds, and already known as ‘the Zoo man’, brought to the 30-line Portland Place studio a remarkable menagerie. (Dr Seth-Smith is on the far right in the image above, which is of a studio broadcast from Alexandra Palace more than two years later, in November 1937.)
The PasB for the July transmission lists as visitors, in addition to a group of keepers, an African python, a boa constrictor, a king penguin, a panda and a mongoose, a chimpanzee, a lion cub, and an alligator, as well as a variety of fish and birds.
As far as I can see the first broadcast of animals by the 30-line process was two years before, when Seth-Smith brought a selection to Studio BB in the bowels of Broadcasting House. I don’t believe there were other 30-line appearances, but Seth-Smith also made a number of radio broadcasts in the 1930s, especially for The Children’s Hour.
To accompany a broadcast in August 1934, Radio Times confided to its younger readers:
All of you who like the Zoo Man and his talks so much would probably like to hear something about him-how he came to be fond of animals, how long he has been at the Zoo. Well, David Seth-Smith has been associated with animals and birds since he was a small boy. Even in the nursery his favourite toy was a wooden owl that used to watch him from the mantelpiece.
He had the good luck to live in the country, and the great friend of his boyhood was his father’s gamekeeper, who, to his mind, was the wisest man in the world. David would steal out of bed early in the morning, go down through the woods, and meet his friend as he was leaving his cottage. He was given a hen bullfinch which the keeper had reared from the nest, and, in looking after it, be discovered the affection one can get from a bird.
Under the title Friends from the Zoo animals from Regent’s Park were regularly taken to Alexandra Palace in the three years of the ‘high definition’ service leading up to the war, and for pictures of the first visit there in November 1936, go here.
Once OBs were established, broadcasts from London Zoo regularly graced the schedules, and these were also invariably introduced by the David Attenborough of those years, David Seth-Smith.
[OTD post no. 226; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
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