9th February 2025
John Wyver writes: the evening of Thursday 9 February 1939 saw a 40-minute edition of Contrasts, which was a catch-all title for juxtapositions of variety artists from differing traditions. This was a particularly eclectic line-up featuring dancers from Java and Bali performing Japanese classical dance; singers Harry van Oss and Naya Grecia; Dutch-born writer and actor Selma van Diaz performing ‘The Lady’s Maid’ monologue-as-short-story by Katherine Mansfield; and dances by Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jewish refugee who had been a pupil of modernist dance pioneer Mary Wigman.
This modernist melange was assembled by the artist Pearl Binder, who was not only a co-founder in 1933 of the radical Artists International Association but also an Alexandra Palace regular providing illustrations for television talks about fashion and other subjects.
read more »
8th February 2025
John Wyver writes: The News on Friday 8 February 1935 carried the prediction by Captain A.G.D. West, who headed up the Baird company operations at Crystal Palace, that television would be ‘in practically every home within three years.’ The paper carried a detailed report of Captain West’s adddress to the Upper Norwood Rotary Club, but it is in fact another clipping that I want to highlight for today.
Under the headline ‘Magic spotlight on the screen’, the Daily Telegraph ‘Television Correspondent’ contributed a fascinating column about watching on the same day the BBC’s 30-line service on a mirror-drum receiver and an experimental Baird 180-line transmission from the Crystal Palace on a new cathode-ray receiver.
read more »
7th February 2025
John Wyver writes: the afternoon of Monday 7 February saw the first presentation of The Three Bears, an original short ballet for the screen by choreographer Joy Newton. This was not, as the News Chronicle claimed, ‘the first ballet designed specifically for television’, but it was one element in the enormously rich dance culture of the informal partnership throughout the 1930s between the traditional form and the new medium.
read more »
6th February 2025
John Wyver writes: readers of The Era daily on Wednesday 6 February 1935 enjoyed two stories about television that, exactly 90 years on, suggest how unstable the very idea of television was then. Under the heading “Tellies” there was speculation about what the paper proposed was ‘the verbal coinage likely to be minted by Television.’
More substantively, the leader headline trumpeted the ‘news’ that Postmaster-General Sir Kingsley Wood had to date said nothing about ‘the coming Television attachments for telephones’. Despite this silence, the paper’s radio correspondent G.A. Atkinson was confident that what he was happy to dub ‘televista-phones’ were ‘coming soon’.
read more »
5th February 2025
John Wyver writes: The evening of Sunday 5 February 1939 was taken up with a 105-minute version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with John Abbott as Prospero and actor, writer and poet Stephen Haggard as Ariel. Playing Caliban was George Devine, after the war the co-founder and artistic director of the influential English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Trinculo was Richard Goolden (who many, many years later I saw giving his legendary Mole in Toad of Toad Hall), and Peggy Ashcroft was Miranda.
The producer was the creatively ambitious and, as one writer trailed, ‘experimental-minded’ Dallas Bower (header image), who we have already encountered on several occasions in these posts. An unrepentant modernist and unabashed intellectual, Bower is something of a hero for me. He is also, as I have said elsewhere, the figure at AP with whom I most closely identify.
read more »
4th February 2025
John Wyver writes: What is arguably the origin moment of one the simplest and most obvious television techniques occurred in a broadcast talk on the evening of 4 February 1938.
The esteemed art historian R.H. Wilenski was reviewing the mammoth exhibition of seventeenth-century European visual art on show at the Royal Academy. He was speaking with reproductions of key paintings in the studio, and producer Mary Adams conceived the idea of moving a camera across one of the photographs. What three decades and more later rostrum camera maestro Ken Morse would do every working hour, Adams appears to have invented on the spot.
read more »
3rd February 2025
John Wyver writes: ‘Oho! Here’s another television experiment,’ is how Grace Wyndham Goldie began her review of Death at Newtownstewart, first broadcast on the afternoon of Friday 3 February 1939. The critic’s top line response was that, ‘it failed.’
Nonetheless, as a review in The Times detailed, the broadcast was clearly genuinely innovative, and as Wyndham Goldie recognised, ‘an experiment like this, in the present state of television, is a hundred times more interesting than any ordinary, trivial success on established lines.’
read more »
2nd February 2025
John Wyver writes: On Wednesday 2 February 1938 The Times reported that, ‘A television set with a screen about twice the size of that in the standard home receiver was demonstrated by the Marconi-EMI company in London last night.’ This was the Marconiphone 708, a snip at a cost of 200 guineas, inclusive of aerial and free installation. Which is a price that is just shy of £20,000 in today’s money.
read more »
1st February 2025
John Wyver writes: In the depths of winter, on the afternoon of Wednesday 1 February 1939, one of the mobile outside broadcast units made a first visit to Bulls Cross Farm at Waltham Cross, just off the A10 10 miles north of Alexandra Palace. This Month on the Farm would become a regular monthly OB through to the autumn, and was the pre-war precursor to the likes of Countryfile (1988- ) and Lambing Live (2010-2014).
read more »
31st January 2025
John Wyver writes: Since the end of November I have been posting most days about an aspect of British television before the Second World War. Through January I have managed a post each day, and here I have brought together the links to of each one, along with a short description of each, arranged in chronological order of the programmes, events and publications that they discuss.
My aim is to continue with these posts through to the publication in early 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: British Television between the Wars, which is a cultural history of the medium between 1926 and 1939, and which is linked to the Centenary (see the first entry below) of John Logie Baird’s first public presentation of “true television”.
read more »
