24th May 2025
John Wyver writes: Just as for the BBC’s coverage this week, 87 years ago the corporation’s mobile unit visited Chelsea Flower Show (above) for three broadcasts, beginning with a 40-minute broadcast on Sunday 22 May with Freddie Grisewood and Elizabeth Cowell, along with television gardener Mr Middleton, looking at the construction of various gardens.
The team returned the next afternoon for a half-hour transmission, with Mr Middleton interviewing various exhibitors, and on Tuesday 24 May a 20-minute show late morning featured a discussion of flowers in the East Tent (likely the scene in the image above), as well as consideration of topiary and garden furniture.
The Times approved:
Television afforded a new delight to viewers last week, when they were taken by Mr C.H. Middleton on a personally conducted tour of the Chelsea Flower Show. Mr Middleton always gives the impression that he has come straight to the microphone with the mud still clinging to his boots, and this time we could see him in a real garden [as opposed to patch of ground taken over near the AP studio] and enjoy to the full the easy informality of his talk.
The visit to Chelsea on Monday was especially interesting, for not only did we have glimpses of busy workmen creating the gardens before our eyes, but some of the most famous exhibitors were brought before the cameras to tell us about their exhibits and to show them to us.
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23rd May 2025
John Wyver writes: Television’s main offering on Tuesday 23 May 1939 was a 45-minute studio debate titled simply Modern Art. As the billing detailed, ‘Sir William Rothenstein took the chair. Mr Wyndham Lewis and Mr Geoffrey Grigson championed ‘unconventional’ modern art and Mr Reginald Blomfield and Mr A.K. Lawrence attacked it and put forward ‘conventional’ modern art.’
By this point in his late sixties, William Rothenstein was a distinguished portraitist and writer on art who from 1920 to 1935 was Principal of the Royal College of Art. Wyndham Lewis was a former enfant terrible and Vorticist, who had only recently returned to painting, while Geoffrey Grigson was known mostly as a poet, although he had exhibited in the 1936 London Surrealist Exhibition.
Reginald Blomfield was a prolific architect, architectural historian and garden designer, and his confrere A.K. Lawrence was a fine figure painter and muralist, as well as a stalwart of the Royal Academy. From this distance, you would have to say that the ‘moderns’ fielded the stronger team.
As can be seen from the photograph, the studio set-up allowed a range of paintings, prints and photographs to be displayed on a kind of magazine rack in front of the speakers (De Chirico’s ‘Death of a Spirit’ is visible.) Among the reproductions shown were artworks by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Miro, Magritte and Paul Nash, along with a number of representational works.
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22nd May 2025
John Wyver writes: British television’s love affair with the works of Jane Austen, which today shows little signs of abating, began 87 years ago today on 22 May 1938, with a 55-minute adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The fact that this was a Sunday is a pleasing continuity across nearly a century, although television on the Sabbath had started only seven weeks before. (Janeites had been first catered for by radio over a decade earlier, as David Hendy’s recent ‘History of the BBC’ post notes.)
As the rare photograph suggests (there’s no recording), television’s first foray into Austen’s universe had time and space for only three of the Bennet sisters, played by Antoinette Cellier (Jane), Curigwen Lewis (Elizabeth) and Eileen Erskine (Lydia; there was no Mary or Kitty), while Barbara Everest was Mrs Bennet and Allan Jeayes her husband.
Television’s first Mr Darcy was Andrew Osborn, André Morrell was Mr Wickham, Lewis Stringer took the role of Charles Bingley, and Dorothy Green incarnated Lady Catherine de Bourgh. To date, I have found no review of this live presentation [but see Comment below], which was played again on the afternoon of Friday 27 May.
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21st May 2025
John Wyver writes: The day before the transmission variously called Bee for Boulestin or Blind Man’s Buffet on the evening of Sunday 21 May 1939, the Daily Telegraph ran an excited preview. ‘Mrs Mary Adams, the BBC producer,’ ‘Our radio correspondent’ promised, ‘has invited a number of guests who will consent to be blindfolded and led to a buffet laden with food and drink.’
A team of three men was to compete against three women, who
may be asked to distinguish between Camembert, Gruyere and Gorgonzola cheese, red and white wines, the various constituents of hors d’oeuvres, tinned and fresh food and different kinds of poultry.
One of the participants was to be philanthropist Dowager Lady Swaythling ‘who recently confessed she preferred a kipper to caviare.’
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20th May 2025
John Wyver writes: At the bottom of column 5 on page 2 of the Thursday 20 May 1937 edition of The Era newspaper was a story headlined ‘Look In When You’re Passing’. Part of the Gaumont British media conglomerate, this weekly journal was almost a house magazine for the theatrical and cinema professions, and it was increasingly turning its attentions to the service from Alexandra Palace that had started six months earlier. In full, this brief news item ran:
Down in South London there is a public-house which includes a free television show among its amenities, coupled with the inviting slogan: ‘Look In When You’re Passing!’ Response is such that the lounge is invariably crowded at the crucial hours and there is as yet no sign of the novelty losing its charm. CEA headquarters, asked if any definite steps had been taken in regard to the licensing-house entertainments, replied darkly that there was ‘something brewing’.
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19th May 2025
John Wyver writes: The line-up for the BBC’s 30-line transmission starting at 23.03 on Friday 19 May 1933 featured Russian singer Dimitri Vetter together with Lilian Lloyd-Taylor ‘with songs and costumes of the seventeenth century’. But the most interesting featured performer, at least for those of us interested in modern(ist) dance, was Leslie Burrowes, who gave her solos ‘Fear’, ‘Three Studies from a Celtic Suite’ and ‘Pastoral Dance’.
Born in 1908, Leslie Burrowes, according to The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism,
had studied and performed with Margaret Morris, whose ‘free dance’ method belonged to the Hellenic and Duncanesque nonballetic dance techniques of early twentieth-century Britain. Burrowes rejected her original dance training in favor of [Mary] Wigman’s expressionism, returning to London in 1931 to proselytize on its behalf and to serve as Wigman’s official British representative. Burrowes’ attempts to establish Wigman’s dance in Britain were largely unsuccessful, caught in the squeeze between the better-established ballet and Hellenic dance.
She had already appeared in a 30-line broadcast in March 1933, and she would return to the studio in October, and then twice more under her married name of Leslie Goossens in February and July 1935, on each occasion giving a different selection of solos.
Burrowes is the subject of a richly detailed 2010 Dance Research journal article ‘Leslie Burrowes: A Young Dancer in Dresden and London, 1930-34’ by Larraine Nicholas (available open access here). This focuses on Burrowes’ professional life from the point when she went to study with Mary Wigman in Dresden to when she was back in London teaching and struggling to establish herself as a professional dancer. Nicholas doesn’t mention her television appearances, but her article is fascinating for the context that it provides for these transmissions.
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18th May 2025
John Wyver writes: On Saturday 18 May 1935, The Evening Star published a detailed and fascinating story headlined ‘King’s Interest in Television: Tests Made at Windsor Castle’ which as far as I’m aware has not to date been noticed in any history of television, including (currently at least) my own forthcoming Magic Rays of Light. The story in the ‘On all wavelengths’ column, bylined simply ‘Henry’ (as above) began as follows:
The BBC’s young and enthusiastic television director, Eustace Robb, is a personal friend of the Prince of Wales. Probably that accounts for the Royal Family’s interest in the latest craze, television.
Historical footnote: in May 1935 the reigning monarch was George V, who had been king since 1910 and who died in January 1936; the Prince of Wales was Edward, destined to be Edward VIII for just January-December 1936.
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12th May 2025
John Wyver writes: Today’s post is an extract from chapter 7 of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, to be published in January 2026.
On or about 12 May 1937 British television changed. That was certainly the view of those producing the service from AP, and the assessment was shared by many of the estimated 60,000 who, from Ipswich to Brighton, were watching.
From 15.04 to 15.59 on that Wednesday afternoon a live outside broadcast from Hyde Park Corner featured scenes of the waiting crowds and then of the passing Coronation procession on its return journey to Buckingham Palace.
Although it does not enjoy the centrality in popular memory of Elizabeth II’s Coronation 16 years later, the pomp and ceremony that marked George VI’s accession was profoundly significant at the time. And the new medium made its modest contribution as, for the first time (leaving aside earlier test transmissions), viewers could see live pictures from a remote location of a defining occasion of international significance.
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11th May 2025
The 150th original OTD post in this series.
John Wyver writes: Monday 2 May 1938 (I know, I know) saw pianist Harriet Cohen together with the a modestly enhanced BBC Television Orchestra give a studio concert at Alexandra Palace of music by Thomas Arne and Bach. The image above is of her on this occasion.
The producer of this half-hour presentation was Dallas Bower, but it’s less the broadcast that I want to focus on and more a fascinating Listener column that it prompted – and that was published on Wednesday 11 May. The writer of ‘Music to look at’, which was a careful close-reading of the broadcast, was the ever-so-slightly mysterious ‘G.G.W.’, who was still contributing reviews alongside regular filings by Grace Wyndham Goldie.
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10th May 2025
John Wyver writes: The evening of Wednesday 10 May 1939, just before a programme of Spanish music by Albeniz and Granados, offered the first programme in a series called Sunday in the Country. This was ‘a walk in the country described by Russell Muirhead, with the aid of photographs, maps and diagrams’. Plus a squirrel, of which a little more a little later.
By early 1939 the television service was looking beyond London and beginning to take an interest in country matters. The monthly outside broadcast Down on the Farm was a substantial rural offering, but otherwise the service was restricted, thanks to opposition from the unions, in not making film programmes.
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