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.
John Wyver writes: ‘Fashion’ in programmes from pre-war Alexandra Palace invariably meant clothes for women, but there was an outlier on the evening of Tuesday 6 July 1937. Men’s Dress Reform was a 17-minute programme produced by Mary Adams looking at costumes entered for the Coronation competition held under the auspices of the Men’s Dress Reform Party. It is fair to say that it was not a success.
Host Dr J.C. Flugel, author of The Psychology of Clothes, explained that the Men’s Dress Reform Party[MDRP] aimed to promote clothes which were healthy, attractive and practical. The competition was divided into two classes: (a) office, professional or other vocational wear, and (b) ceremonial or evening wear.
As an anonymous television reviewer commented drily in The Listener:
No first prize was awarded because the judges felt that no design reached the required standard…
John Wyver writes: Tucked in at the end of the afternoon’s programming on Monday 5 July 1937 is a curious three-minute ‘local OB’ titled The Coronation Train. Goodness knows that the result was like but, with commentary by Leslie Mitchell, this was apparently a shot from a studio Emitron run out onto the balcony of Alexandra Palace of LNER’s ‘Coronation Train’ passing by in the distance.
LNER’s streamlined train had left King’s Cross at 4pm on its inaugural six-hour journey to Edinburgh. The header image is the cover of the marketing booklet issued by the train company.
John Wyver writes: The late-night 30-line broadcast on Tuesday 4 July 1933 featured alongside comedian Sydney Arnold and Olive Groves with songs from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the Russo-Finnish dancer Cleo Nordi. Trained in St Petersburg, she had been a celebrated soloist with Anna Pavlova’s company between 1926 and 1931.
That night in July, in one of her many appearances on the 30-line service, she gave a rumba to a tune by Lewis Gensler, a ‘gypsy dance’ to a Riccardo Drigo composition, and a Glazunov ‘Bacchanale’. Accompanying her were a trio of piano (the ever-reliable Cyril Smith), harpsichord and drums.
John Wyver writes: Stage representations of the Great War were rare in the first decade after the Armistice, and it was R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, which became a major hit after its premiere in late December 1928, that defined the theatrical representation of the western front. The play offered an unsentimental, tragic sense of the conflict, and in November 1937 this was the Television service’s first substantial dramatic presentation of the war.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the ways in which loss and grief marked the interwar period so deeply, there were then another ten or so AP dramas that engaged directly with the conflict and its legacies. These war plays included Ernst Johannsen’s Brigade Exchange, set in a German telephone dugout on the western front, which was first produced for radio in Munich in 1929.
John Wyver writes: For just over an hour on the afternoon of Sunday 2 July 1939 OB cameras from Scanner 2 (its counterpart was at Wimbledon) relayed the parade of National Service organisations in Hyde Park. Some 20,000 volunteers marched past the King taking the salute, with representatives participating from ARP Services, Auxiliary Police, Civil Nursing Reserves and more.
According to ‘E.H.R.’ in The Observer, the pictures ‘were very good indeed’. As for Grace Wyndham Goldie’s view:
You can’t beat an outside event like the National Service Rally when bands are playing, crowds are cheering, and the camera work is good.
Two months later, the nation was at war with Germany, and in retrospect both the event and the media coverage, including newsreels and a National Programme broadcast, can be seen as part of preparing a ‘war-minded’ nation.
[OTD post no. 197; 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: Lookers-in on the evening of Saturday 1 July 1939 were treated to a 50-minute anthology of scenes from literature about the law. Compiled by Barbara Nixon and produced by Desmond Davis, this followed on from a selection of love scenes shown in January under the title of O Mistress Mine.
The earlier transmission featured scenes from Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It, Congreve’s Love for Love and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, as well as J.M. Barrie’s Quality Street, Noel Coward’s Private Lives, and – perhaps somewhat incongruously, act 3 of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
The running order for Fiat Justitia was even more eclectic. A scene from Alice in Wonderland (illustrated above) was followed a Dogberry episode from Much Ado About Nothing, then extracts from Six Men of Dorset, a tale of the Tolpuddle Martyrs written by Miles Malleson and H. Brooks.
Following this were an A.P. Herbert tale, The Last Glass, and the melodrama Young Madame Conti by Bruno Frank Taut, which had recently been staged on Broadway [and in London – see below]. A scene from Elmer Rice’s Judgement Day preceded a return visit to Alice’s world, before Portia from The Merchant of Venice rounded things off, presumably with ‘The quality of mercy’ from act 4 scene 1.
The company was extensive and impressive, and included Barbara Nixon, Jessica Tandy, Selma Vaz Dias, Holland Bennett and Basil Cunard. Grace Wyndham Goldie was broadly supportive:
This was better acted, notably by Jessica Tandy and Arthur Young, than the earlier example in the style, O Mistress Mine. It was also more obscure and generally rather less successful. But this was probably inevitable. Justice, after all, presents more problems than courtship.
[OTD post no. 196; 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: Today’s post, as I also note below, is the 195th in this series which I is a kind of extended trail for my forthcoming book from Bloomsbury/BFI, Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which is to be published in January.
Cerain of the posts have been extracts from the manuscript, while many more have been extensions of and complements to things that I uncovered in my research. I have been much cheered by the likes and shares on social media, and by the occasional comments on the blog, although I woulkd unquestionably appreciate more of both.
I started the posts at the end of November and in January I plan to mutate the project into another form, which is likely to be less demanding for both author and readers. So today’s post is something like a halfway point, and I am using it simply to select 10 of my favourite contributions since the last group of reprises in early April.
The entries are featured here in the chronological order of the events they reference, and I have included only minimal descriptors in the hope that this will encourage you to click through to the full posts.
