John Wyver writes: Making a Poster on the evening of Monday 21 February 1938 featured artist Dora Clarke, familiar from other AP broadcasts, taking the audience through the stages of producing what was not exactly a poster, but rather the front cover of a forthcoming issue of The Listener.
Nor was Ms Clarke actually the designer, who was in fact Pat Keely, a significant creative figure and designer of the wonderful ‘Night Mail’ poster (the original art for which is below, and for the service not the documentary), but relegated on this broadcast to assisting the presenter while remaining (as the PasB noted) out of vision.
John Wyver writes: Frustration reigned at AP on the afternoon of Saturday 20 February 1937 as it proved impossible to get the vision system working and between the sound-only transmission of records director of television Gerald Cock had to make two audio apologies for the breakdown. By the evening all was well, and act 2 scene 3 of Twelfth Night was played before a variety bill with entertainers Flotsam and Jetsam and acrobats Blum and Blum.
After which the studio was graced by a visit from Flora Robson, who was then filming Fire Over England at Denham (above, as Elizabeth I with – I think – Leslie Banks as the Earl of Leicester). Sitting alongside the actor for a transmission titled Stars and their Directors was not in fact William K. Howard, the film’s director, but Erich Pommer, one of the producers, together with Alexander Korda, .
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Saturday 19 February 1938 saw high drama enacted in and around Alexandra Palace. Fire Up Aloft was a 25-minute fire-fighting demonstration given by members of the Enfield Fire Brigade, with the full-hearted participation of Jasmine Bligh, above.
The broadcast was a ‘local OB’, achieved by taking studio cameras onto the terrace adjacent to the studio building but keeping them cabled to the internal control room. This was a programme form that was very popular right at the start of the AP service, although with the arrival of the mobile control unit transmissions of golf lessons and model aircraft displays in the park came to seem rather tame. Not so Fire Up Aloft.
John Wyver writes: Just after 10pm on Saturday 18 February 1939 the AP schedule carried an unbilled 3-minute item titled Special Transmission. This was a short interview with the Mr Edgar Charloe of Acton about his suggestion for a ‘Viewer’s Club’.
The broadcast followed up a recent article that ‘The Scanner’ wrote for Radio Times prompted by a letter for Mr Charloe and reflecting on the idea of ‘a club or society of viewers’. Although the idea seems not to have developed, the discussion is perhaps one of the earliest indications of concerns about television, isolation and sociability. Plus, the Programme-as-Broadcast information solves the mystery of the identity of ‘The Scanner’, although only for the pre-war years.
John Wyver writes: ‘We certainly live in a marvellous age,’ Amanda reflects to Elyot in the second act of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. ‘Too marvellous,’ replies Elyot, noting, somewhat ambivalently, that among the marvels of the age are bovine gland injections, and ‘aeroplanes, and Cosmic Atoms, and Television.’
The afternoon of Tuesday 17 February 1938 saw the second performance via the marvel of the age that was television of Coward’s one-act comedy from the cycle Tonight at 8.30, Hands Across the Sea. This was one of five pre-war screen stagings of his work, Which means that Coward was the modern playwright who, after Bernard Shaw, achieved the second-highest number of pre-war productions on BBC Television.
The first was his comic ‘interlude’ Red Peppers in November 1937. Then Hands Across the Sea before the full-length plays of Hay Fever, on the evening of Christmas Day 1938; The Young Idea in February 1939; and then in August that year, days before the service shut down because of the war, Private Lives.
John Wyver writes: In the afternoon and the evening of Tuesday 16 February 1937, Philip Thornton presented the fourth of six talks under the heading The Orchestra and its Instruments. ‘Hybrid Winds’, as the programme was subtitled, featured the perhaps surprising selection of Bulgarian drums and bagpipes, Northumbrian bagpipes and a West African marimba.
This early transmission from AP, just over three months into the service, was a rare example of a Talks programme concerned with music. Pre-war Talks similarly largely ignored literature, but majored on the visual arts and architecture. And then there was the somewhat eccentric choice of host.
John Wyver writes: Looking through the schedules of 1938-39 there is little sense that television was strongly ‘war-minded’. The newsreels would have relayed the worsening situation in Europe but there appears to have only a minimal concern for preparing viewers for the coming conflagration.
One exception is an intriguing presentation on the evening of Wednesday 15 February 1939, billed simply as A.R.P. This half-hour discussion with Alderman Harold Riley and architect Berthold Lubetkin was ‘a demonstration of the Finsbury A.R.P. Plan for structural defence’, illustrated with drawings, film extracts and a model of a deep shelter.
John Wyver writes: A late-night treat (which in those days meant scheduling at 10pm) on Monday 14 February 1938 was the 13-minute Bridge Demonstration hosted by Hubert Phillips (above). Members of the Welsh (male) team that had taken on England in the Bridge International at Cardiff the previous day, played out a hand or two as Phillips offered a commentary and tips.
The transmission was one of a number of such Bridge games for AP’s upscale suburban audience, which in the pre-war years was also offered lessons in ballroom dancing and in tennis, golf and show-jumping.
John Wyver writes: On the morning of Monday 13 February 1939 Alexandra Palace offered a 6-minute glimpse of studio rehearsals for George More O’Ferrall’s presentation, to be shown that afternoon, of the comic drama The Royal Family of Broadway (above). The producer introduced on screen several of the cast of Edna Ferber and George Kaufman‘s play, including Dame May Whitty and Basil Radford.
This exceptional transmission was organised to play into an elaborate and extensive display of television receivers, which also included a small on-site studio, that opened that morning at Selfridge’s (and to which we will return in a future post). But my interest here is rather the thoughtful Listener column by Grace Wyndham Goldie that was prompted by what she called More O’Ferrall’s ‘successfully brisk production’.
John Wyver writes: The afternoon schedule on Sunday 12 February 1939 began with two caption cards accompanied by Bing Crosby (on record) singing ‘Please’ and, I assume, some words from on-duty announcer Elizabeth Cowell. That morning’s Sunday Times explained the context for the request made to viewers:
During this afternoon’s television transmission from Alexandra Palace it will be announced that a complete census of television viewers, with an analysis of their preferences in programmes, is to be made.
