Elizabeth Schooling danced the role of ‘La Fille au Bar’, and others in the cast Celia Franks, Prudence Hyman and Walter Gore. William Chappell created the costumes and setting, which had been made for the tiny stage of the Mercury Theatre and imported into the studio, and which as can be seen from a production photograph aimed to replicate the details of Édouard Manet‘s great and enigmatic 1882 painting Un bar aux Folies Bergère.
John Wyver writes: Almost all pre-war television comedy came courtesy of funny men in variety bills, or in dramas taken over from the theatre. But there is one pre-war original series that points the way to the future of television humour.
In the Barber’s Chair, ‘a sketch by Reginald Arkell’, was given an 11-minute slot in early March 1939, with a second episode that had its second outing on the afternoon of Friday 24 March. Born in 1881, Arkell was a comic novelist who also wrote many musical plays for the London theatre, including an adaptation of the spoof history book 1066 and All That: 1066—and all that: A Musical Comedy based on that Memorable History by Sellar and Yeatman.
John Wyver writes: On Thursday 23rd March 1939 the 227th edition of the magazine series Picture Page was transmitted in the afternoon and, following the usual pattern, the 228th was shown that evening. In the afternoon, the show ran for just under 25 minutes; with an entirely different selection of guests in the evening it played for 36 minutes.
Joan Mitchell at the switchboard was the link between short interviews by Leslie Mitchell with a series of guests, a number of whom had brought props. There was no set, just a plain background, although sometimes guests sat at a table or, more often, walked around with the camera operator trying hard to keep them in focus.
The series was the single acknowledged ‘hit’ of pre-war transmissions from Alexandra Palace, in part because of the eclectic line-ups, which is what I want simply to celebrate today.
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Tuesday 22 March 1938 was graced with the first performance of Dallas Bower’s 75-minute production of Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello. As Wikipedia says, the drama is ‘a study on madness with comic and tragic elements… about a man who believes himself to be Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.’ Ernest Milton played the ‘king’, with Valerie Hobson taking the role of Frida, his daughter.
Pirandello was the European playwright most frequently performed pre-war at AP. In addition to a new presentation of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (which Lance Sieveking had staged for the 30-line serviced in 1930, three more Pirandello plays were given, including The Jar and Fruits of Remembrance, as well as Henry IV in this typically ambitious production by Bower.
John Wyver writes: Starting at 2.55pm on Tuesday 21 March 1939, the television service carried a 16-minute outside broadcast from Victoria Station where the King and Queen greeted His Excellency the President of the French Republic and Madame Lebrun.
Michael Standing and John Snagge were the commentators during a broadcast which included shots of the crowds gathered outside the station; the scene of greeting on the platform with, among others, the Dukes and Duchesses of Gloucester and Kent, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Lascelles; shots of the arrival of the state coaches and the departure of the procession. For the acute critic Grace Wyndham Goldie, this was an occasion of signal significance.
John Wyver writes: On the afternoon of Saturday 20 March 1937, following a display of model aircraft, producer Dallas Bower oversaw the first transmission of the 35-minute Pasquinade, claimed as the first original revue for the new medium. Conceived in his ‘incorrigibly highbrow’ manner (the description is director of television Gerald Cock’s), Bower brought together the talents of, among others, dancer Maude Lloyd, writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, and actors Hermione Baddeley and Valerie Hobson (above, photographed by ‘Sasha’ in 1937).
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Friday 19 March 1937 saw the Television’s first Grand National, although not with live pictures from Aintree. Instead, as was the case with other sports events during the pre-war years, and especially before the mobile control room entered use in May 1937, ‘viewers’ had to make do with radio commentary, which was carried on the television channel, accompanied by generic photographs of the course.
Radio Times provided the ‘air-photo’ below to help listeners follow the commentary, and this is the kind of thing that AP would have put in screen during the race (although we don’t know if this one was used). Comparable ‘coverage’, and still no live pictures, was provided by AP in 1938 and 1939.
John Wyver writes: For whatever reason, it seems to be the case that 18 March was a somewhat unremarkable date for early television in each of the years between 1928 and 1939. Nothing jumped out at me as the subject for today’s post, and so I thought I might begin a new way of indexing some of the 105 posts to date – in part in the hope of encouraging you to access ones you might have missed.
Following is a list of the blog posts so far about studio drama on early television, listed in chronological order. from the first production of a play in December 1928, Box and Cox (above), to a 1939 one-night-only studio restaging of a production then running in the West End.
John Wyver writes: After a concert from Jack Hylton and his band on the evening of Friday 17 March 1939, Alexandra Palace broadcast Animals, Anatomy, Artists, a talk by John Skeaping on ‘the three main types of animal art – documentary, creative and caricature’. He illustrated this with his own drawings (above) and with animals brought from the zoo which were described by naturalist and later noted author James Fisher.
Fisher was an assistant curator at the zoo in the 1930s, and was about to publish his first book, Animals as Friends and How to Keep Them. He brought to the studio two penguins, a mongoose, a goat and a kid, while Skeaping himself contributed two French poodles as additional models.
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Wednesday 16 March 1938 saw a reprise of Eric Crozier’s production (above), first presented the previous September, of W.B. Yeats’s supernatural drama The Words Upon the Window Pane. The cast was led by Jean Moncrieff and Harcourt Williams, and Joyce Redman played the spirit ‘Lulu’.
In a 2020 article about the stage play, the veteran Guardian critic Michael Billington noted that he would love to see a stage production, which underlines how rarely the drama has been revived since the war, but the television version had five outings between 1937 and 1939. The text can be ‘borrowed’ for reading from archive.org here, and Billington provided a useful synopsis:
The Words Upon the Window-Pane (sic) (1930) is in many ways exceptional: it is Yeats’s only play with a realistic modern setting. Its subject is a seance held by the Dublin Spiritualist Association in rooms once occupied by Jonathan Swift’s Stella. Yeats has much fun at the expense of the visitors – one of whom wants advice about setting up a teashop in Folkestone – but the main concern is to expel an evil spirit who has been haunting past sessions.
