OTD in early British television: 25 November 1937
John Wyver writes: After a lengthy hiatus and posts concerned with other matters, we need to return our attention to the pre-war television schedules. So let’s look back 88 years to Thursday 25 November 1937 when the high definition service was just a year and three weeks old. At 15.01 that day, and again at 21.14, the schedule featured short outside broadcasts from the Elstree film studios. This was day three of a four-day visit, following earlier outings that autumn to Pinewood and Denham.
On Thursday afternoon film star Aileen Marson (above), standing in for a billed Elsa Lanchester, accompanied Leslie Mitchell and four pressmen on a tour round a quartet of sets to look at aspects of scenic design. According to the Programme-as-Broadcast form, they saw ‘a snow scene in Russia’, ‘a scene in a Persian market’, ‘an English street scene in pouring rain’, and ‘a London street scene in a fog’. That evening director Albert de Courville and actor Albert Burdon was interviewed by Freddie Grisewood against a background of the final shots of their comedy Oh Boy!.
Only four months on from the first successful remote outside broadcast, of the Coronation procession in May 1937, AP had committed to an ambitious cycle of transmissions from three major film studios on the fringes of the capital: Pinewood first, then Denham and Elstree. The notion appears to have come from director of television Gerald Cock, and in part was the new medium wanting to associate itself with the glamour and modernity of movie making, perhaps even to suggest some sense of equivalence. At the same time television was endeavouring to demonstrate its marketing potential to the industry.
At Pinewood the BBC production team feared that the film people might, as studio manager D.H. Munro noted, ‘be prepared to laugh at “the infant television”.’ As a consequence he and OB producer Dallas Bower requested the service’s most skilled technicians, but engineer Douglas Birkinshaw was deeply sceptical about the value of the visit, and refused to permit the allocation of studio staff. An exchange of testy memos reveals the tensions at this point between the more established studio operation and the largely unproven OB unit. In fact, apart from minor damage caused by an aerial coming loose on the final morning, the Pinewood visit was a technical triumph.
Broadcasts from Alexander Korda’s Denham studios followed a fortnight later, but the BBC found access here limited. Suggesting that the BBC might secure better cooperation at Elstree than at either of the other two studios, OB manager Philip Dorté explained to Gerald Cock that, ‘Elstree has a definite inferiority complex now that it can no longer claim to be the Hollywood of England.’ Home to John Maxwell’s Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC; formerly British International Pictures), the studio had opened a decade before, which was long enough to give it an aura of history.
In the first transmission, two days before Marson and Mitchell’s tour, much was made of a distinguished tradition, with extracts from Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) and, together with piano accompaniment, from E.A. Dupont’s silent drama Piccadilly (1929). In the present day, however, Dorté struggled to pull together a compelling sequence of broadcasts, although there were encounters with, among others, Charles Laughton, Otto Kruger and soubrette Sally Gray.
Aware of the paucity of exciting content, Munro arranged an innovative stunt for the final broadcast. Cameras and receiving sets were installed both in the main viewing theatre at Elstree and in studio A at Alexandra Palace, and a brief two-way conversation was broadcast between Gerald Cock and ABPC’s director of productions Walter Mycroft. Foreshadowed for so long in speculative fiction, here was the first broadcast in Britain of a kind of televisual telephony.
Seated by her home hearth, film critic C.A. Lejeune, writing in the Observer, delighted in the vicarious visits to Elstree. ‘I found the experience the most exhilarating thing that has happened to me,’ she wrote, ‘since I sat in the old Piccadilly Theatre nine years ago and heard the screen crackle and boom out its first full-length soundtrack.’
‘As the image of a studio’s spirit,’ she continued, ‘[the series of broadcasts] was brilliant. The life of the film-making world was there, restless, turbulent, hard-driving, superficially chaotic… We met the people who make the films, and the people who are made by the people who make them. A writer would have given his soul to create an atmosphere half so clear.’
The experience prompted Lejeune to reflect further on the cautious relationship between television and the film industry. The latter, she saw, was terrified of the former, and her analysis appears to be informed by knowledge of the lengthy tussle between the BBC and Gaumont-British about access to films and newsreels.
‘If I were a British film producer or renter at this moment,’ she proposed, ‘with foreign competition strong, with the bottom dropping out of the home market, I should welcome television as a heaven-sent saviour.’ She could see the future, and understood it could work.
‘Nothing is going to stop [television’s] progress; nothing is going to limit its ultimate efficiency. The film industry may handicap and harass it, boycott and outlaw it, but in the end the film industry will have to succumb and work with it.’ Arguably, it would take the studio moguls at least another four decades to heed her words.
Aileen Marson, incidentally, had a short life that ended sadly. According to Wikipedia, she was born in Egypt in 1912, then trained at RADA, and started as a stage actor before beginning in 1934 a highly successful career in British films. In the year of this broadcast she married the South African businessman Jack Scott, but then died at the age of 26 in May 1939 a day after giving birth to twins.
[OTD post no. 281; 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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