John Wyver writes: Noting ‘E.H.R.’s brief review in The Observer on Sunday 16 July 1939 of East End, a programme that was broadcast four days before, allows me both to preserve OTD-ness today while at the same time writing about a really interesting programme that I would have otherwise missed.
Of East End, the critic wrote that it was
an exploration of London’s slums and industrial areas, of which most of us know very little. It was a real gain to knowledge.
East End was a kind of follow-up to Soho, a ‘documentary’ made in the Alexandra Palace studio about which I wrote in April. Producer Andrew Miller Jones and journalist S.E. Reynolds made another attempt at bringing to AP characters from an area of London and presenting them, along with brief film sequences, in a succession of studio settings, a number of which were suggested visually by the penumbrascope. Silk weavers, upholsterers and other inhabitants were interviewed by Mass-Observation co-founder and polymath Tom Harrisson, who we have also met before in this blog.
John Wyver writes: By Friday 15 July 1938 the BBC’s mobile control unit was well-established at Roehampton Club providing the third of four days’ OBs from the private sports facility in south London. The range of summer leisure activities that was shown was calculated to appeal to the upscale suburbanites who comprised the overwhelming majority of the still-small television audience.
On this day Jasmine Bligh took a golf lesson at 3pm from club professional A.G. Matthews, before participating in a display of trick motorcycle riding with nine riders from the London Divisional Signals, Territorial Army. Up-for-anything Jasmine was pictured, both on screen and in the Daily Telegraph the following day, riding in a side-car from which the wheel had been removed.
John Wyver writes: Ninety-five years ago today, for 26 minutes from 3.30pm on the afternoon of Monday 14 July 1930, The Man with the Flower in his Mouth by Luigi Pirandello was broadcast. This is unquestionably a significant anniversary, since this was a pioneering drama transmission overseen by the visionary producer Lance Sieveking and co-produced by the Baird company and the BBC.
But this is not the anniversary of Britain’s first television drama, although the production has long been thought to be exactly that. Rather, that accolade belongs to Box and Cox, shown on 15 December 1928, as an earlier blog post detailed. Nonetheless here is part of the story of The Man…, in an edited extract from my forthcoming Magic Rays of Light.
John Wyver writes: Across nearly three hours on the evening of Thursday 13 July 1939 an outside broadcast of the operetta The Desert Song was transmitted from the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End. By this point the BBC’s mobile units were practiced at full-length relays of stage shows, but an especially dark scene in the drama posed a problem that in turn prompted an imaginative solution.
The Desert Song was a revival of a successful 1926 Broadway operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel. Incongruously, as Wikipedia explains, the show
was inspired by the 1925 uprising of the Riffs, a group of Berber fighters, against French colonial rule in Morocco. It was also inspired by stories of Lawrence of Arabia aiding native guerrillas. Many tales romanticizing Saharan North Africa were in vogue, including Beau Geste and The Son of the Sheik.
John Wyver writes: Another first – the opening 10-minute episode on the evening of Tuesday 12 July 1938 of television’s earliest serial “soap”, written by venerable actor Louis Goodrich and titled Ann and Harold.
The main characters are Ann Teviot, in the language of the cast list ‘a spinster’, played by Ann Todd, and bachelor Harold Warden, a role taken by William Hutchison. Since the episode is called ‘Their First Meeting’, this is clearly what fans would later recognise as ‘the meet-cute’. Presumably the dog in the photo above, a Sealyham Terrier called Tuppence, is key to the encounter.
John Wyver writes: We have already seen how in May 1938 television’s love affair with Jane Austen began with a compacted adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Less than two months later, the new medium first entered the world of Charles Dickens with the lawsuit scenes from The Pickwick Papers, billed as Bardell Against Pickwick. First shown on the evening of Wednesday 6 July, the production was played again on the afternoon of Monday 11 July.
The 37-minute adaptation was undertaken by producer Stephen Harrison who, as Radio Times‘ ‘The Scanner’ informed readers,
had had to write a few words here and there to maintain the continuity, but an examination of the script shows that Dickens might well have written the scene especially for television.
John Wyver writes: Under producer Eustace Robb, the BBC’s 30-line Television service mounted increasingly elaborate productions of classic ballets. Among his most enthusiastic collaborators was former Diaghilev star Lydia Sokolova, who first adapted the one-act Cléopâtre which Michel Fokine had originally choreographed for Diaghilev in 1909. Sokolova followed up with an adaptation of George Balanchine’s The Gods go a’Begging, and on consecutive Wednesdays 3 and 10 July 1935 a version of Fokine’s 1910 Carnaval, to music by Schumann.
Born Hilda Tansley Munnings in Essex, Sokolova was given her stage name by Diaghilev when she joined his company in 1913. She danced with Nijinsky and led the touring company in Leonide Massine’s celebrated 1920 The Rite of Spring. On Diaghilev’s death, she returned to Britain to teach and choreograph, and to collaborate on early television ballets.
Carnaval seems to have been the most delicate, most exquisite ballet Michel Fokine ever created, as well as the most difficult to pinpoint. As was the case with many of his works, the roles depended to a large degree upon the talents of the original performers, and if one looks at just the steps (except for the one Harlequin solo) they are almost simplistic.
It was the infusion of lightness, gaiety, coyness, and self-absorption, combined with an underlying sadness—all of which must be contributed by the dancers—that resulted in what most critics of the time regarded as a most effective adaptation of Schumann’s music and characters.
The image shows Lydia Sokolova as Columbine, Travis Kemp as Pierrot, Stanley Judson as Eusebius (Kemp and Judson were billed in each other’s role) and, as Pantalon, Algeranoff.
[OTD post no. 205; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
John Wyver writes: Responding to the full-length drama given on the evening of Sunday 9 July 1939, Grace Wyndham Goldie in her column for The Listener did not hide her judgement from her readers:
There were half-a-dozen curious things about the new play, The Fame of Grace Darling, which was given its first performance last week. Infinitely the most curious was the fact that it was performed at all. For it was as handsomely bad as any piece I remember.
The writing was banal; the characters stereotyped; the plot non-existent; the whole thing an essay in an outmoded sentimentality which came near to burlesquing itself.
This despite Grace Darling being played by Wendy Hiller despite the use of a cast of 24 in an elaborate production using three sets with four cameras and a lighting rig of twenty-four main lamps, and despite the transmission being overseen by the invariably reliable, if occasionally eccentric, Fred O’Donovan.
John Wyver writes: In its first month of operation the Television service from Alexandra Palace presented extracts from a theatre production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. But the new medium’s real engagement with the major playwrights of the time began on 8 July 1937 when George More O’Ferrall presented George Bernard Shaw’s comic three-hander, How He Lied to Her Husband.
Shaw travelled to Alexandra Palace to watch this 1905 play on a monitor, standing alongside Gerald Cock. In the wonderful header image, Shaw can be seen seated with producer George More O’Ferrall on the floor, along with actors Greer Garson, Derek Williams and D.A Clark Smith.
John Wyver writes: ‘Television seen 200 miles away’ ran the heading of a front-page story in The Era on Thursday 7 July 1938, along with the sub-heard, ‘Paris received on the South Downs’. And the report continued,
Startling possibilities are foreshadowed by the successful reception on the South Downs of a complete transmission from the Eiffel Tower 200 miles away.
This important chapter in the history of television was written on the screen at the Dyke Hotel, 700 feet above sea-level, where the transmissions from Alexandra Palace are regularly received at as good a quality as in London, though the receiver is twice the official effective distance from the transmitting station. The whole of the Paris programme, lasting for two hours, was successfully received.
