OTD in early British television: 31 August 1939
John Wyver writes: The day before closedown, Thursday 31 August, saw the publication of a Listener column by Grace Wyndham Goldie responding in part to a broadcast by Paul Robeson. A week and a day earlier the great singer had stood next to a piano (above) to perform ‘Water Boy’, ‘Night’, ‘Old Man River’ and ‘Lover’s Lane’. But Grace being Grace she could not simply wax lyrical:
Last week’s programmes were a treat. I might almost call them a fair treat. For they were designed for the crowd, animated by the needs of Radiolympia. Did we want to see what television can do with singing? Here was Paul Robeson. With ballet? We were shown Alice Markova. Outdoor stuff? There was Test Match Cricket and there were, tours of the Zoo.
Having passed those well-deserved compliments I now propose to draw a few less comfortable conclusions. The fact is that these programmes were deceptive; ingeniously and legitimately deceptive but deceptive all the same. For by picking artists of quite exceptional individuality and talent in various lines the authorities skilfully obscured the fact that the problems of presenting these lines in television are still unsolved.
Take Paul Robeson for instance. The point here is that television has scarcely begun to tackle the’ enormous difficulties involved in presenting music successfully on the television screen. Now the presentation of singers is one of the most pressing of these problems.
We have a lot of singers, and television producers for the most part do not yet present them at all. We merely get changes from close shot, full face, to close shot, profile. And the result is often very peculiar. For in television, unlike the film, singers are shown when they are actually singing. So they are, very rightly, concentrating on the production of their voices rather than on the expression of their faces.
The result in close up is often a series of diverting, open-mouthed grimaces which are a distraction from the singing rather than an addition to it. Here, then, is a problem which television must face. But by choosing Mr. Robeson to sing last week it was neatly side-stepped.
For there is no doubt that enjoyment of Mr. Robeson’s richly beautiful voice is greatly enhanced by seeing him. Why? Because he is one of those singers whose face and manner convey a rare quality of personality and because contact with this personality forms part of our delight in hearing-him. But there are very few singers of whom this is true. And television cannot always give us Mr. Robeson. So the problem still remains urgent.
[OTD post no. 257; 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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