17th September 2025
John Wyver writes: I hope you’ll forgive me over the next three weeks if on certain days I simply reprise via a link or links one or more earlier posts. Mostly this is because I have just received, and need to spend some serious time on, the page proofs of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain. If I keep to the deadlines, Bloomsbury will publish this in hardback and paperback, and as an e-book, on 8 January (and which can be ordered in advance and at a discount here).
I’m not going to count these posts in my running total, and I will continue to offer original columns every other day or so. But meanwhile I’m going to select a handful of favourite posts, as well as some that have some relevance to the particular day of publication, as today.
I wrote previously at the link below about the reprise presentation in March 1938 of W.B. Yeats’ supernatural drama The Words Upon the Window Pane (above), and it was on the afternoon of Friday 17 September 1937 that Eric Crozier’s production was first transmitted:
OTD in early British television: 16 March 1938
16th September 2025
John Wyver writes: On Friday 16 September 1938 a television OB unit was among newsreel cameras at Heston Aerodrome to provide live coverage of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return from meeting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. You can see the camera in the upper-left of the crowd.
A first transmission that afternoon began at 3pm even though the PM was not expected to arrive until 5.15pm. Thirteen minutes of what was presumably regarded as a test for later were filled with general shots of the airfield and a Lockheed 14 arriving, from which disembarked Mr MacMillan, chief instructor of British Airways Ltd, who was interviewed on camera.
The main event started at 17.18, catching the arrival and landing of the PM’s plane as well as his address to the crowd. Lord Halifax and German chargé d’affaires Dr Kordt were in attendance. By 17.39 the broadcast was over.
For one of his last columns for The Listener, Peter Purbeck was watching:
When the Prime Minister arrived at Heston last Friday evening and, on alighting, made a brief speech about his mission to Germany, the owners of ordinary receiving sets were able to hear the speech broadcast. Owners of television sets did not only hear it, they saw it being spoken, they saw all the stirring background of aeroplane, pressmen and excited crowd.
Despite the brevity of the coverage, this was the event that, as Purbeck recognised, ‘gave us the first real taste of television as a news-gatherer.’ Unlike the largely predictable Derby or Coronation procession, this was
news of the quick, sudden, mobile sort, the real news of the tape-machine, the singing telegraph wires, the special edition and the strident voice of the paper boy.
[OTD post no. 273; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
15th September 2025
John Wyver writes: For just over half an hour from 5.29pm on Wednesday 15 September 1937, a test outside broadcast from the Arsenal Football Club at Highbury showed part of a match between Arsenal Reserves and Millwall Reserves. Unbilled in Radio Times, this was essentially a trial for light levels, and yet it is nonetheless the earliest transmission of a professional football match.
The broadcast was the prelude to two days featuring broadcasts from Highbury. On Thursday, there was a 15-minute presentation from the pitch with commentator John Snagge, footballer Clifford Bastin and legendary Gunners manager George Allison (above). Friday featured shots of training, with team members including George Maleand Ted Drake introduced by Allison.
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14th September 2025
John Wyver writes: Here’s a curiosity that stretches across pre- and post-war, and the latter part of which I owe to the scholar Geoff Brown. On the afternoon of Tuesday 14 September 1937, Dallas Bower produced for the AP television service a 25-minute variety bill with the title Song and Dance.
Featured was supper club chanteuse Hildegarde and a ballet, ‘High Yellow’, to a score by Spike Hughes with choreography by Bower’s regular AP collaborator Antony Tudor. The four dancers were Peggy van Praagh, a noted Ballet Rambert regular where she performed other Tudor creations; two other Rambert company members, Elizabeth Schooling and Brigitte Kelly; and Charlotte Landor.
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13th September 2025
John Wyver writes: Running at 56 minutes when it was first transmitted on Tuesday 13 September 1938, Felicity’s First Season by Charles Terrot has a claim to being the first full-length play written for television. The script, however, preserved on microfiche in the BBC archives, reveals it as theatrical comedy manqué, taking place in two rooms with just a short filmic bridge to indicate a change of scene to Scotland.
According to one critic, ‘the audience was amused and interested throughout’ by the mildly diverting tale of the rivalry for the hand of debutante between an impecunious journalist and a posh boy with a private plane. George More O’Ferrall was the producer entrusted with this fluff. ‘The result,’ the critic concluded, ‘was something between a stage play and a film – that is to say, good television entertainment.’
[OTD post no. 270; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
12th September 2025
John Wyver writes: It’s Tuesday 12 September 1939, and we are a week and two days into the war. Television came off the air on the Friday before Neville Chamberlain’s declaration, but thanks to the excellent work of Andrew S. Martin in his monumental seven-volume Sound & Vision collection, published by Kaleidoscope, we know what the service was planning, at least in outline terms, through to 21 October.
For this Tuesday the service had in mind an OB from a West End theatre, which according to an earlier item by ‘The Scanner’ in Radio Times, was to be from the premiere of I Can Take It, starring Jessie Matthews (above) and her husband Sonnie Hale. Following a successful provincial tour, this had been scheduled to open tonight at the London Coliseum, but the war had led also to its cancellation.
The OB appears to have been planned along the lines of a previous one, in November 1938, from Under Your Hat at the Palace Theatre, which had Leslie Mitchell interviewing celebrity arrivals, interviewing the stars in their dressing rooms, and then transmitting early scenes from the show.
[OTD post no. 269; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
11th September 2025
John Wyver writes: The evening of Wednesday 11 September 1935 saw the final 30-line broadcast from the BBC studio in Portland Place. There had been regular BBC transmissions since August 1932, but now following the Selsdon Report’s recommendation that a high definition service be started, these were discontinued with little fanfare or recognition.
The Selsdon Report on the future of television, published in January 1935, had been only modestly positive about the achievement of the more than 600 30-line presentations, recording that they had ‘a certain value to those interested in Television as an art, and possibly, but to a very minor extent, to those interested in it only as an entertainment.’
The decision of when to close down the transmissions was left to the newly constituted Television Advisory Committee (TAC), which in May acceded to the BBC’s wishes that they be given permission to do this. No public announcement from Selsdon, the TAC or indeed the BBC recognised the extraordinary journey made by the medium since the Baird company’s’s first simultaneous sound and vision broadcast from Long Acre on 31 March 1930.
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10th September 2025
John Wyver writes: The evening schedule on Wednesday 10 September 1937 featured a 9-minute talk by Anthony Bertram titled What is Good Design? The producer was Mary Adams, and the PasB detailed that the broadcast was ‘illustrated by examples of household goods — china, irons, electric light fittings etc.’
As Mary Adams refllected in 1948:
To television may come credit for raising the general level of artistic appreciation, and reviving in the public a warmer climate of understanding. The detection of visual vulgarity by the viewer and his rejection of ugliness in everyday things, might be the beginning of such understanding.
Bertram was an art historian who was a confrere in this crusade. As a National Gallery lecturer, he had begun giving radio talks as early as September 1923, including The History and Meaning of Modern Painting in November that year. Strongly committed to modernism, he authored volumes on Picasso and Matisse, and in 1935 published a book with the Corbusian title of The House: A Machine for Living In.
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9th September 2025
John Wyver writes: As promised yesterday, this is the fascinating text of Grace Wyndham Goldie’s LIstener column, ‘The Drama of Television’, dated 9 September 1936, with her first thoughts about the new medium. As the weekly’s radio drama critic, she had seen a demonstration during the Radiolympia broadcasts arranged ahead of the BBC’s ‘high definition’ service going on air on 2 November 1936.
What is television going to do to radio drama? Change It? Obviously. Revolutionise it? Probably. Kill it altogether? NO. You have only to watch the first television programme put out from Alexandra Palace for this to be perfectly, hearteningly clear.
I had been told that television was too raw for it to be worth bothering about yet; that the small size of the pictures made them difficult to watch and that the things seen flickered so much that a great strain was put upon the eyes. Most of this is nonsense.
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8th September 2025
John Wyver writes: Today and tomorrow I want to highlight two early columns about television by the doyenne of pre-war critics, Grace Wyndham Goldie. And I want to do so by showcasing them in, as it were, reverse order, with the later one, from 8 September 1937 today, and more or less her first words about television, from 9 September 1936, tomorrow.
Tomorrow’s is concerned with first thoughts about the medium itself, whereas this one focuses on a particular production. Before this Wyndham Goldie was steeped in the theatre, having worked with the Liverpool Playhouse and written a book about its history, and in radio drama, writing for several years about the artform that debuted just before television.
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