21st December 2024
John Wyver writes: On the evening of Monday 21 December 1936 extracts from from the current stage production T.S. Eliot’s religious drama Murder in the Cathedral were played for a third time at Alexandra Palace. Despite having to work within the significant technical constraints of the Baird company technology, producer George More O’Ferrall was felt to have achieved a polished and innovative live broadcast. But it is one reception context that makes this transmission notable, for it was watched on this day by some three hundred luminaries of stage and screen in the auditorium of the West End theatre where the production was currently running.
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20th December 2024
John Wyver writes: The evening line-up from Alexandra Palace on Tuesday 20 December 1938 featured a News Map talk about Poland, a concert by Eric Wild and his Band, and what was billed as Tactile Bee, in which blindfolded celebs of the day, including John Betjeman and Secrets of Life filmmaker Mary Field, identified objects by touch. Just before 10.30pm an unscheduled 11-minute outside broadcast took the viewer to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for a preview of the following day’s broadcast of ‘King of Pantomime’ Tom Arnold’s spectacular Babes in the Wood (above).
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19th December 2024
John Wyver writes: Wednesday 19 December 1928 saw one of the earliest documented trasnmissions from the new studio (above, from Television, December 1928) of the Baird Television Development Corporation at 133 Long Acre in London’s Covent Garden. Four days after the broadcast from there of Box and Cox, highlighted in an earlier post, The Baird Concert Party offered ‘songs and patter’ from A.F. (‘Peter’) Birch, who is on the right in the photograph, and performances from baritone A. Calkin and comedian Reginald Shaw, with piano contributions from Constance (‘Connie’) King and Philip Hobson.
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18th December 2024
John Wyver writes: There was a sense of increasing confidence at Alexandra Palace at the end of 1938, with sales of receivers finally picking up and programmes becoming both more ambitious and more polished. This was reflected in announcements for a clutch of major drama productions over the Christmas period, including Noel Coward’s Hay Fever on Christmas night, an Edgar Wallace thriller, The Ringer, a re-run of Once in a Lifetime, and on the evening of Sunday 18 December, Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux. (The image is a souvenir made by Motley of the original stage production in 1933, from the collection of the V&A; for more see below.)
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17th December 2024
John Wyver writes: Thursday 17 December 1936 saw an edition of one of the first television series, London Characters. In a 7-minute broadcast shown both mid-afternoon and mid-evening, John Snuggs, ‘the troubadour’, demonstrated paper tearing with his partner accordionist, Van Hornibrook. Others who featured in this occasional and ultimately short-lived strand (there were just five shows) included ex-Pipe Major Massie, ‘the bagpipes man from Trafalgar Square (pictured, in a framegrab from the BBC Television Demonstration Film); John Cairns, street busker; Hansom cabman Albert Frisbee; Alf the shrimper; and Jack Smith, tomato seller.
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16th December 2024
John Wyver writes: At 21.07 on Thursday 16 December 1937 the Television service from Alexandra Palace broadcast the sixth in the series Experiments in Science. This 16-minute edition had the subtitle Reconstructing the Past, and featured Margot Eates of the Institute of Archaeology, assisted by Delia Parker and Ione Gedye, demonstrating the reconstruction of prehistoric fragments of pottery from Maiden Castle in Dorset (above, from the west, photographed by Major George Allen in 1937).
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15th December 2024
John Wyver writes: simply another selection of stuff that has engaged me over the past week or so.
• Carl Th. Dreyer in the silent era: a wonderful clutch of writings and films newly available from the wonderful Danish Silent Film site about the director’s early films; the link is to Casper Tybjerg’s overview of the first years of Dreyer’s career, and there his fascinating essay The Dreyer paratext, plus two newly digitised (and freely accessible) films, Leaves from Satan’s Book, 1921 and The Bride of Glomdal, 1926 – and there’s much more at the associated Dreyer website. Truly an exemplary collection of online resources.
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15th December 2024
John Wyver writes: Saturday 15 December 1928, 96 years ago today, is a milestone date in the history of early television in Britain. Or at least it should be, since the day saw the transmission of the first television drama in Britain, a version of John Maddison Morton’s Box and Cox. The accolade of this ‘first’ is invariably given to the 1930 Baird Company/BBC transmission of Luigi Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. Yet the medium’s long tradition of drama began with a demotic comedy, not a fragment of anguished modernism.
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14th December 2024
John Wyver writes: Nothing. No television broadcasts from Alexandra Palace on Monday 14 December 1936, and only an apologetic mid-evening sound announcement. A fierce gale had damaged the transmission mast and taken the service off-air. A contributor to the January 1937 issue of Television and Short-wave World takes up the story:
The horizontal arms which carry the aerial arrays are hinged in the centre and these appeared to be bent upwards owing to the stays having broken. Efforts were immediately made to remedy the defect, and the ordinary B.B.C. engineers in spite of the high winds climbed the mast to make an inspection of the damage and actually sucteeded in repairing the lower aerial, which is used for the sound transmissions, so that an announcement could be put out at 9 p.m.
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13th December 2024
John Wyver writes: Presented on the afternoon of Monday 13 December 1937 was the most ambitious television ballet to date, act 2 of, as it was billed, Le lac des cygnes, or Swan Lake to the rest of us. The troupe was the Vic-Wells Ballet Company, from which chrysalis the Royal Ballet would emerge post-war, and this was their production that had premiered in November 1934. Studio manager and now producer D.H. Munro was at the control desk.
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