OTD in early British television: 7 August 1939
John Wyver writes: You can sense from Alexandra Palace’s schedules that August was the cruellest month for those running the service in 1938 and 1939 (and remember that Television shut down for three weeks in 1937). Producers and crews were presumably on their holidays, ideas appear to be in short supply, and it was clearly a struggle to fill the hours. Even the programme titles have a slightly desperate air, as in Make Sure of a Wet Bank Holiday! on the afternoon of 7 August 1939.
A 40-minute outside broadcast from Finchley Open Air Swimming Pool, this transmission was introduced by Leslie Mitchell and Elizabeth Cowell. Mitchell talked to four young women who told him they were chorus girls rehearsing a new Jessie Matthews show, and he interviewed Monica Waldack, Finchley Bathing Beauty Queen.
Elizabeth Cowell was consigned to the children’s pool to see what entertainment the little ones could provide, and apart from a two-minute loss of vision in the middle of the broadcast, other attractions included Highgate Diving Club member Mr Fitzjohn on the greasy pole and Mr Diplock smoking a pipe under water. Perhaps you had to be there.
The location was certainly an attractive one, as Ruby Rowallan details in a recent and immensely rich Finchley Lido blog post. As they detail, this was
A London lido with a spectacular children’s pool of almost the same dimensions. It was the first heated swimming pool in London but it never got above tepid temperatures.
Finchley Lido was on a huge site that allowed for extensive buildings, lawns and pebble beaches for spectators. It was approached down a short avenue, leading to a tile-roofed neo-Georgian entrance block. On the poolside there were an elegant colonnade of Roman Doric columns, with fountains to either side.
The pool opened [in September 1931] a year before its official ceremony and then the then Duke of York (after, King George VI) unveiled a plaque that is ignominiously sited behind the counter [in] the Nandos restaurant that occupied the repurposed main building… The pool, alongside the Empire Pool in Wembley, was used in the 1948 Olympic Games for men’s water polo… [Much later] the pool was the first in the UK to offer gay nudist swimming sessions.
The pool was closed in 1992 and demolished in 1994.
[OTD post no. 233; 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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