OTD in early British television: 14 September 1937
John Wyver writes: Here’s a curiosity that stretches across pre- and post-war, and the latter part of which I owe to the scholar Geoff Brown. On the afternoon of Tuesday 14 September 1937, Dallas Bower produced for the AP television service a 25-minute variety bill with the title Song and Dance.
Featured was supper club chanteuse Hildegarde and a ballet, ‘High Yellow’, to a score by Spike Hughes with choreography by Bower’s regular AP collaborator Antony Tudor. The four dancers were Peggy van Praagh, a noted Ballet Rambert regular where she performed other Tudor creations; two other Rambert company members, Elizabeth Schooling and Brigitte Kelly; and Charlotte Landor.
Hughes was known for his cross-over compositions combing classical music with jazz, and an earlier version of ‘High Yellow’ had apparently been pulled together quickly five years earlier, when according to Wikipedia it was
put on by the Camargo Society at the Savoy Theatre in London, June 1932. Choreography for the ballet was by Frederick Ashton and Buddy Bradley. The title comes from the once widely used, now discredited term high yellow, describing mixed black and white ancestry.
Indeed, ‘high yellow’ has a complex and deeply problematic history, which is laid out in detail here.
Neasrly twenty years later Dallas Bower directed the short, sponsored film Into the Light, which was the British Electrical Development Association. Made by Verity Films in 1956, this is described onscreen as including a ‘Musical Fantasy’ set to the ‘High Yellow’ score (as below).
The film can be viewed here, which is where the somewhat crude framegrabs come from; bringing it to my attention (since we share an interest in the odder corners of the Bower filmography), Geoff Brown described this accurately to me:
Choreography, mostly consisting of non-dancers swaying about in time to the music’s rhythms (header image), is by ex-Diaghilev dancer Nina Tarakanova. The master of ceremonies is Gilbert Harding, who commentates from a desk and tells all about the importance of getting more and better lighting in the home.
The dancers represent the Jones family (header image), who by the time the 14-minute film is over have all realised the benefits of having wall-fixed lamps not just one overhead lamp in the centre of a room, fluorescent lighting around bathroom mirrors, proper reading lamps, etc. etc. – all of which, we’re told, will cost them less than the price of striking a match.
[OTD post no. 271; 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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