John Wyver writes: Television on the afternoon of Sunday 2nd April was mostly occupied by the 40-minute feature Leviathan, described as ‘a survey of sea-monsters, past and present’. A discussion between Lt-Commander R.T. Gould, author of The Case for the Sea-Serpent, and London zoo curator David Seth-Smith framed dramatised scenes (above, and in full below) bearing witness to tales of beings from the deep.
Apparently Lt-Commander Gould had told Picture Page viewers the previous October that he was a firm believer in the existence of sea monsters, and in this programme producer Stephen Harrison offered him the chance to expound his views more fully. What intrigues me most about the transmission, however, is the writer credited for the dramatised scenes, Reyner Heppenstall.
John Wyver writes: After an hour or so’s coverage of the Boat Race on the morning of Saturday 1 April 1939, that afternoon Alexandra Palace offered the television premiere of Michael Powell’s 1937 feature film The Edge of the World. Made as a passion project with independent finance by Powell, the film was the sole recent British feature to be screened by the pre-war service.
Filmed across four arduous months on and around the Shetland island of Foula, The Edge of the World had achieved only a very limited theatrical release in Britain and its marginal status in relation to the industry at the time meant that it was available for showing on television. As the copy for the BFI DVD release of the 1990 restoration recounts,
The Edge of the World tells the moving story of a remote island and its inhabitants, whose traditions and way of life are threatened by a rapidly industrialising world. To settle an argument over whether the islanders should give up their livelihood and move to the mainland, two childhood friends follow an ancient tradition and climb the island’s highest cliff face. The outcome shatters the island’s peace and splits the two clans apart.
John Wyver writes: At 9.06pm on Thursday 31 March 1938, AP presented The Hogarth Puppet Grostesques, produced and manipulated (along with Ann Hogarth and Kitty Tyzack) by Jan Bussell (above). On the programme were performances of ‘The Puppet Orchestra’, ‘The Green Man’, ‘The Indian Rope Trick’ and ‘The Dream Dancer’, given to recordings of music by Grieg and Tchaikovsky.
Ann Hogarth was trained as a stage manager at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Jan Bussell was an actor and television producer already involved in puppetry when the two met and, looking for new initiatives in puppet theatre, worked together as full-time puppeteers. Their repertoire, for adults and children, mixed different techniques of puppetry in an adventurous range of pieces: literary dramas, children’s tales, poetry and songs, music hall and circus turns.
John Wyver writes: To the South Pole on the evening of Tuesday 30 March 1937 marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions in the Antarctic. The half-hour studio programme brought together (as the billing announced) ‘Professor Debenham, Mr Cherry-Gerrard, Mr Wright and Captain Bruce’ along with relics of the ill-fated expedition. Towards the end of the broadcast extracts were shown of Herbert Ponting’s film With Captain Scott to the South Pole.
John Wyver writes: In mid-March 1939, Alexandra Palace rolled out a metaphorical red carpet for the state visit of France’s President and Madame Lebrun. Alongside an outside broadcast of the King and Queen greeting the visitors at Victoria Station, the schedules featured L’Avare, Lady Gregory’s version of Molière’s The Miser; a News Map edition about France; and Les Jeux d’Eau, an elaborate assembly of French music and songs.
The real world schedule of the republic’s representatives also included an evening with the royals at Covent Garden. There the full Vic-Wells Ballet gave a command performance of acts 1 and 3 of a new ‘pared down and low-budget’ production of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Princess (also known as The Sleeping Beauty).
Three days later, on Saturday 25 March, and then again on Wednesday 29 March, acts 1 and 2 of this elaborate staging was given across both studios at AP. Marius Petipa’s original 1890 choreography had been revived by former Maryinsky Theatre ballet master Nicholas Sergueff, and Nadia Benois had designed costumes.
John Wyver writes: 28 March appears to be another unremarkable date in each year of pre-war television, and as a consequence it offers the opportunity to compile another subject index to my 113 original posts to date. The format is similar to my earlier one highlighting posts about early television drama, listing the posts in chronological order of subject, except that the focus of this one is dance from ballet to ballroom.
As before, these daily blog posts are intended to run until the publication at the start of 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain. For fuller indexes of previous posts go here for February posts, here for January ones, and here for ones in December (and the end of November).
John Wyver writes: On Monday 27 March 1939 television visited His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, for a three-hour relay, produced by Dallas Bower, of Magyar Melody, a romance set in Hungary with book and music co-written by the BBC’s former director of variety, Eric Maschwitz. This was the third live broadcast of a full-length West End show, following When We Are Married and Twelfth Night.
Writing evocatively in The Listener, Grace Wyndham Goldie was clear that she approved, albeit with a qualification or two:
Well, you can do it. You can sit at home in your own armchair in Kent or Sussex with the owls hooting in the elms outside your window and watch the performance of London stars in a London musical comedy in a London theatre. Here, in fact, is the moment for which we have all been waiting. It arrived last week with the success of Magyar Melody.
John Wyver writes: The Sunday evening play on 26 March 1939 was a production by Desmond Davis of Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century comedy She Stoops to Conquer. Morris Harvey and Renée le Vaux played Mr and Mrs Hardcastle, with James Hayter as Toby Lumpkin and Eric Portman as Young Marlow.
Three weeks later, with almost the same cast, Davis put on a modern adaptation of the play, re-written in the language of the 1930s by Giles Playfair, under the title A Night at the Hardcastles. Now a drama in modern dress with motor-cars, cocktails and cigarettes, this was based on a film treatment by Playfair’s father, the late Sir Nigel Playfair.
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.
