Blog

OTD in early British television: 10 September 1937

10th September 2025

John Wyver writes: The evening schedule on Wednesday 10 September 1937 featured a 9-minute talk by Anthony Bertram titled What is Good Design? The producer was Mary Adams, and the PasB detailed that the broadcast was ‘illustrated by examples of household goods — china, irons, electric light fittings etc.’

As Mary Adams refllected in 1948:

To television may come credit for raising the general level of artistic appreciation, and reviving in the public a warmer climate of understanding. The detection of visual vulgarity by the viewer and his rejection of ugliness in everyday things, might be the beginning of such understanding.

Bertram was an art historian who was a confrere in this crusade. As a National Gallery lecturer, he had begun giving radio talks as early as September 1923, including The History and Meaning of Modern Painting in November that year. Strongly committed to modernism, he authored volumes on Picasso and Matisse, and in 1935 published a book with the Corbusian title of The House: A Machine for Living In.

In the autumn of 1937 Bertram was about to embark on a radio series, Design in Everyday Things, which began a month after his television talk, and to accompany which the BBC published the booklet illustrated above. For more on this, including some page spreads, see this blog post from Modernist Tourists.

In January 1938 Adams brought him back to the screen for a four-part series called simply Design. One of his programmes featured furniture from Messrs Heal & Son; another brought Adams herself in front of the cameras to discuss table utensils. 

There was also a discussion with M.L. Anderson, Secretary of the Design and Industries Association for which Bertram was billed as the interviewer, but for which Adams appears to have stood in as a last-minute replacement.

Also in 1938 Bertram authored the widely read Pelican Special paperback Design, which features material that he covered in his radio and television broadcasts.

[OTD post no. 267; 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.]