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.
John Wyver writes: The magazine show Picture Page was the widely recognised ‘hit’ of the pre-war Television service from Alexandra Palace. By the summer of 1939 it was mounted twice on Thursdays, in the afternoon and evening, with often little or no repeat of guests between the two transmissions. Which was the case on Thursday 29 June 1939, when the line-ups were typically eclectic.
The show was linked by Joan Miller at a putative telephone switchboard, and each guest was rigorously rehearsed in advance for their two- or three-minute spot with interviewer Leslie Mitchell. In the afternoon the job of ‘handling’ Indian economist and educator Malcolm Adeseshiah, Travelling Secretary at the Student Movement House, was entrusted to the Jamaican writer and activist Una Marson, who worked on occasions with the programme through 1939.
After achieving success as a poet and playwright in Jamaica, Marson first came to London in 1932, where as her detailed Wikipedia entry notes
The racism and sexism she found in the UK “transformed both her life and her poetry”: the voice in her poetry became more focused on the identity of black women in England. In this period, Marson not only continued to write about women’s roles in society, but also put into the mix the issues faced by black people who lived in England.
She lived again in Jamaica between 1936 and 1938, after which she returned to London, working as a journalist and for Picture Page. Then during the war, in 1941, she was hired by the BBC Empire Service, becoming producer of the show Calling the West Indies, which she transformed into the hugely influential Caribbean Voices.
John Wyver writes: The afternoon and evening of Monday 28 June 1937 saw one of pre-war television’s most innovative performance programmes. Artists who worked regularly in the Alexandra Palace studios often found the resources of time and space frustrating, but the challenges were greater still for dancers and companies who added a day or two at AP to an existing London engagement or British tour.
Nonetheless, a remarkably cosmopolitan procession went before the cameras, exposing the watchful viewer to a wide range of international dance. Most memorable was the troupe Colonel Wassily de Basil formed in the early 1930s and ran, somewhat fractiously. with fellow impresario and co-founder René Blum. The group claimed the legacy and name of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, which had dissolved on the death of the maestro in 1929.
Performances were given at AP in 1937, 1938 and 1939, but the great innovation came on 28 June in the first summer when a rehearsal class was broadcast from Studio A by a company that included two of the celebrated ‘baby ballerinas’, Tatiana Riabouchinska and Irina Baronova. One remarkable image (above) captures Baronova and George Zoritch dancing the pas de deux from Gluck’s Orphée
Producer D.H. Munro recalled
a completely unscripted, unrehearsed programme… Just a bare studio with one or two odd bits of scenery and Arnold Haskell, the famous ballet critic, in front of a studio monitor to do a running commentary.
The cameramen were in certain positions: one on a low tripod, one overhead in the gantry and another on a tracking dolly and it was shot completely off the cuff. I think it was one of the most successful programmes I ever did.
A critic in The Listener concurred:
To compare the ballet rehearsal recently broadcast from Alexandra Palace to a painting by Degas is perhaps bordering on the trite. On this occasion, however, it happens to be true… the image on the screen of the receiver in many ways suggested a painting.
The experiment was repeated the following summer, again with Haskell as a guide, along with future conductor Georg Solti as accompanist. This time it was the writer Thomas Baird who sang its praises in World Film News for
bringing alive this peculiar quality with a spontaneity and immediacy which belongs to television. This production eavesdropped on reality. It was television doing its own peculiar job and therefore television at its own very best.
[OTD post no. 193; 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: The issue of trade paper Kinematograph Weekly (KW to its regular readers) on Thursday 27 June 1935 carried across two pages a report of an important speech made by Captain A.G.D. West about television to the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Assoication (CEA). The owners and operators of cinemas gathered for their annual meeting in Cardiff were only just beginning to consider how the new medium might change their world.
With its founder John Logie Baird effectively sidelined, Captain West had been taken on by the Baird Company, and its owners Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, to drive forward its television operations. He was setting up an extensive studio operation at Crystal Palace, alongside the company’s business manufacturing receivers.
G-BPC’s corporate ambitions, however, had just suffered a blow with the decision of the Television Advisory Committee to base the planned BBC ‘high definition’ service not alongside his operation in south London but rather north of the river at Alexandra Palace.
John Wyver writes: At twenty-past-four on Monday 26 June 1939, just two months before war was declared, Grace Wyndham Goldie showed her green ticket to gain access to Broadcasting House’s Concert Hall (above, in 1932, soon after its opening).
The occasion was billed as a Television Tea Party, to which lookers-in had been invited to listen to and interrogate director of television Gerald Cock. Some 700 set owners had requested a ticket, and from his office wastebasket Cock had drawn 75 names, each to be accompanied by a plus-one.
John Wyver writes: At 11.30am on the morning of Friday 24 June 1938, television’s cameras were at Lord’s for an hour of the second Test Match between England and Australia. Coverage ‘by kind permission of the MCC’ featured commentary by Captain H.B.T. ‘Teddy’ Wakelam, assisted by David Hofman, and Joe Hulme giving his opinion on the match and the players.
In addition to watching the all-important 22 yards of the wicket, viewers saw, as the PasB noted, ‘shots of the crowd, the ground, scoreboard, pavilion, stands, etc.’ Two further hours of play were shown later in the day, either side of a variety show, along with a wrap-up 20 minutes featuring the end of the day’s play.
John Wyver writes: On Saturday 24 June 1939, following a day of visits to Lord’s for the Test match against the West Indies, viewers could enjoy the evening’s 70-minute staging of Edgar Wallace’s play Smoky Cell. Producer Michael Barry was in charge, marshalling a large cast led by American-born, London-based Percy Parsons as police chief O’Regan.
The crime dramas of Edgar Wallace, who had died seven years before, became increasingly important to Alexandra Palace as the new television service realised that it needed more popular plays to attract viewers.
John Wyver writes: Just before 10.30pm on Friday 23 June 1939, pianist Phyllis Sellick closed out the evening transmission from AP with ‘Jeux d’eau’ by Ravel and Liszt’s ‘La Campanella’ arranged by Ferruccio Busoni. Programmes by this point shut down each night with a short presentation of soothing music. After ten previous Piano Interludes, which had started at the end of March, this was Phyllis Sellick’s final television appearance before the war.
A celebrated pianist and teacher, known in particular for her commitment to modern British composers including Vaughan Williams, Michaedl Tippett and Lennox Berkeley, Sellick continued to work into her tenth decade, dying at the age of 95 in 2007. Five years before this, she appeared on Desert Island Discs, which can be heard here.
John Wyver writes: On the afternoon of Thursday 22 June 1939 one of the BBC’s mobile control units was stationed at Waterloo while the other was by the Victoria Memorial close to Buckingham Palace. Six weeks or so before the BBC had seen their Majesties off on their tour of Canada and the United States, and now a two-location outside broadcast was welcoming them back.
From 5.13pm for 20 minutes lookers-in saw the arrival of the Royal Train and then the elaborate ceremony of greetings on the platform with, among others, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, United States ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and Chairman of the Southern Railway, Mr R. Holland Martin. Freddie Grisewood was the BBC’s man on the spot, and a press report detailed that one television camera ‘was trained on Princess Margaret, following her movements closely’.
The television schedule then carried five minutes of Gaumont British newsreel coverage of the tour before in a further 40-minute broadcast commentator Edward Halliday showed the royal coach coming to Buckingham Palace and then George VI and Queen Mary, along with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, waving from the balcony. Also featured, according to the Programme-as-Broadcast form were ‘general crowd scenes’.
