1st January 2025
John Wyver writes: In keeping with the aspirational tenor of Alexandra Palace’s lifestyle programming for its professional middle-class viewers, each winter there was at least one studio broadcast for those looking forward to, or dreaming about, a ski-ing holiday across the channel. In 1939 New Year’s Day offered up Snow and Ice, while a year earlier, on 30 December 1937, the schedules were graced by the unfortunately titled Ski Heil (above).
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31st December 2024
John Wyver writes: New Year’s Eve 1938 saw one of BBC Television’s two outside broadcast units parked round the corner from Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane. For 35 minutes from 11.30pm, from the swanky ballroom there Leslie Mitchell hosted a broadcast billed as Seeing the New Year In! A pair of press accounts suggest that a good time was had by all those present, apart perhaps from the camera operators marooned amidst a sea of partying swells.
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30th December 2024
John Wyver writes: The conventional forms of conventional politics on television are absent from the pre-war Alexandra Palace service. There was no television news, and Panorama, the first regular current affairs magazine show would not debut until 1953. But there were the newsreels, political figures gave bland interviews to appeared on Picture Page, and there were occasional state-of-the-nation talks, including The Pattern of 1936, given on Wednesday 30 December 1936 by Professor John Hilton.
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29th December 2024
John Wyver writes: ‘Are you wondering whether to get a television set or not?,’ critic Grace Wyndham Goldie (above, c. 1937) asked in her Listener review-of-the-year column dated Thursday 29 December 1938. ‘Then let me assure you,’ she continued, ‘that plays are staggeringly successful on the television.’ Taking off from Wyndham Goldie’s round-up, I intend with this post to (start to) celebrate her rich and remarkable writings about pre-war television. Towards the end, I also want to share a mystery and to ask for help in solving it.
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28th December 2024
John Wyver writes: the fourth reprise selection, presented in chronological order, for my blog posts over the past month highlighting some of the research for my forthcoming book about British television between the war, Magic Rays of Light. The first is here, the second here, and yesterday’s is here; normal service will be reszumed tomorrow.
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27th December 2024
John Wyver writes: here’s the third holiday round-up of blog posts from the past month that I have written as preparation for the publication of my book, Magic Rays of Light: British Television between the Wars. The first collection is here, the second here, and one more will follow on Saturday, before normal service is resumed on Sunday.
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26th December 2024
John Wyver writes: here’s a second holiday round-up of blog posts from the past month that I have written as preparation for the publication of my book, Magic Rays of Light: British Television between the Wars. The first collection is here, and two further ones will follow on Friday and Saturday, before normal service is resumed on Sunday.
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25th December 2024
John Wyver writes: for a month now, I have been writing more or less daily blog posts about pre-war British television, linking each one to a programme or event that took place on the same in one of the years between 1928 and 1938 (although we’ll get to 1939 soon).
These come from fragments of my research towards my forthcoming book, Magic Rays of Light: British Television between the Wars. For the next four holiday days, I thought we’d take a break and, for those who missed them, offer up the collected links again, this time in chronological order. On some of the posts I’ve also added additional information in the Comments.
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24th December 2024
John Wyver writes: for whatever reason, pre-war television on Christmas Eve was largely unremarkable, although the Baird Company’s 30-line broadcast on 24 December 1931 appears to have been the first to be described in the billings as ‘A Christmas programme’.
Frustratingly, the January 1932 issue of Television (the masthead of which is above) contains no mention of the transmission, and so we have no sense of the mixed bill delivered by Nat Lewis as Joey the Clown, pantomime cartoons drawn by Rupert Harvey (who would become a regular contributor), and Eve Fulton and Varna Glendstrom as Columbine and Harlequin.
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23rd December 2024
John Wyver writes: spoiled for the eve of Christmas Eve choice today, I think we might attempt a double-header, celebrating Polite Wine Drinking (above) on this day in 1937, and then The Director of Television in the Witness Box, shown on Friday 23 December 1938. The former was a component of Alexandra Palace’s aspirational lifestyle propgramming that also featured bridge, ballroom dancing and tennis lessons. The format was simplicity itself: sat at a dinner table chef Marcel Boulestin mansplained wine in an off-the-cuff manner to Nesta Sawyer.
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