John Wyver writes: More or less from the start of the Alexandra Palace operation viewers wanted director of television Gerald Cock to schedule a regular slot for youngsters. Cock pleaded shortage of resources and airtime, but eventually offered up a first clutch of programmes on the afternoon of Wednesday 19 July 1939.
The Daily Telegraph‘s correspondent the next day declared it ‘an hilarious success’.
Twenty children of BBC employees formed an audience in the studio. and also unknowingly provided part of the entertainment. A camera concealed from them showed pictures of the youngsters, from time to time, intent on the stage and rocking with laughter.
Delightfully, Grace Wyndham Goldie’s verdict was considerably more circumspect:
Television doesn’t yet provide a Children’s Hour. But there crept into last week’s programmes the first of a series which is coyly described as being ‘for the younger viewer’. Now this is important. For the Children’s Hour is one of the triumphant successes of sound broadcasting and the first steps towards a television Children’s Hour are worth watching.
John Wyver writes: On the evening of Tuesday 18 July 1939 Irish playwright and producer Denis Johnston presented The Parnell Commission (above), a reconstruction of the forgery investigation of 1888-89. Johnston had made this as a radio feature some months before, and now he brought together a large cast to act out the judicial inquiry into allegations of crimes by Irish parliamentarian Charles Stewart Parnell which resulted in his vindication.
‘The Scanner’ in Radio Times trailed the transmission in this way:
[A]ll the principal characters… will be made as real to life as possible by being modelled on contemporary Spy cartoons and pictures in the Illustrated London News. You will thus be deprived of Clark Gable, but you will see Parnell with a beard, more or less as he was when The Times printed a letter in 1887 implicating him in the Phcenix Park murders.
Here then is the beginning of the form that would later become identified as ‘drama documentary’.
John Wyver writes: The evening of Monday 17 July 1939 saw one of the BBC’s two mobile control rooms back at the Victoria Palace Theatre for a reprise OB of the musical Me and My Girl, first broadcast on 1 May and subject of an earlier blog post. The transmission came at the end of a week in which there had been a major drama each day, indicating how ambitious the Alexandra Palace schedule now was.
Tuesday 11 saw the second playing of a studio staging of Michael Barringer’s mystery play Inquest which had premiered at the Windmill Theatre in 1931. This had been made into a film in the year it was first played, and it appeared again as an hour long ‘quota quickie’ movie, this time directed by Roy Boulting, in December 1939. At AP an 80-minute adaptation, produced by Lanham Titchener, had former silent movie star Mary Glynne and Herbert Lom as the leads, and Lom again took the role of the Coroner in Boulting’s film.
John Wyver writes: Noting ‘E.H.R.’s brief review in The Observer on Sunday 16 July 1939 of East End, a programme that was broadcast four days before, allows me both to preserve OTD-ness today while at the same time writing about a really interesting programme that I would have otherwise missed.
Of East End, the critic wrote that it was
an exploration of London’s slums and industrial areas, of which most of us know very little. It was a real gain to knowledge.
East End was a kind of follow-up to Soho, a ‘documentary’ made in the Alexandra Palace studio about which I wrote in April. Producer Andrew Miller Jones and journalist S.E. Reynolds made another attempt at bringing to AP characters from an area of London and presenting them, along with brief film sequences, in a succession of studio settings, a number of which were suggested visually by the penumbrascope. Silk weavers, upholsterers and other inhabitants were interviewed by Mass-Observation co-founder and polymath Tom Harrisson, who we have also met before in this blog.
John Wyver writes: By Friday 15 July 1938 the BBC’s mobile control unit was well-established at Roehampton Club providing the third of four days’ OBs from the private sports facility in south London. The range of summer leisure activities that was shown was calculated to appeal to the upscale suburbanites who comprised the overwhelming majority of the still-small television audience.
On this day Jasmine Bligh took a golf lesson at 3pm from club professional A.G. Matthews, before participating in a display of trick motorcycle riding with nine riders from the London Divisional Signals, Territorial Army. Up-for-anything Jasmine was pictured, both on screen and in the Daily Telegraph the following day, riding in a side-car from which the wheel had been removed.
John Wyver writes: Ninety-five years ago today, for 26 minutes from 3.30pm on the afternoon of Monday 14 July 1930, The Man with the Flower in his Mouth by Luigi Pirandello was broadcast. This is unquestionably a significant anniversary, since this was a pioneering drama transmission overseen by the visionary producer Lance Sieveking and co-produced by the Baird company and the BBC.
But this is not the anniversary of Britain’s first television drama, although the production has long been thought to be exactly that. Rather, that accolade belongs to Box and Cox, shown on 15 December 1928, as an earlier blog post detailed. Nonetheless here is part of the story of The Man…, in an edited extract from my forthcoming Magic Rays of Light.
John Wyver writes: Across nearly three hours on the evening of Thursday 13 July 1939 an outside broadcast of the operetta The Desert Song was transmitted from the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End. By this point the BBC’s mobile units were practiced at full-length relays of stage shows, but an especially dark scene in the drama posed a problem that in turn prompted an imaginative solution.
The Desert Song was a revival of a successful 1926 Broadway operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel. Incongruously, as Wikipedia explains, the show
was inspired by the 1925 uprising of the Riffs, a group of Berber fighters, against French colonial rule in Morocco. It was also inspired by stories of Lawrence of Arabia aiding native guerrillas. Many tales romanticizing Saharan North Africa were in vogue, including Beau Geste and The Son of the Sheik.
John Wyver writes: Another first – the opening 10-minute episode on the evening of Tuesday 12 July 1938 of television’s earliest serial “soap”, written by venerable actor Louis Goodrich and titled Ann and Harold.
The main characters are Ann Teviot, in the language of the cast list ‘a spinster’, played by Ann Todd, and bachelor Harold Warden, a role taken by William Hutchison. Since the episode is called ‘Their First Meeting’, this is clearly what fans would later recognise as ‘the meet-cute’. Presumably the dog in the photo above, a Sealyham Terrier called Tuppence, is key to the encounter.
John Wyver writes: We have already seen how in May 1938 television’s love affair with Jane Austen began with a compacted adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Less than two months later, the new medium first entered the world of Charles Dickens with the lawsuit scenes from The Pickwick Papers, billed as Bardell Against Pickwick. First shown on the evening of Wednesday 6 July, the production was played again on the afternoon of Monday 11 July.
The 37-minute adaptation was undertaken by producer Stephen Harrison who, as Radio Times‘ ‘The Scanner’ informed readers,
had had to write a few words here and there to maintain the continuity, but an examination of the script shows that Dickens might well have written the scene especially for television.
John Wyver writes: Under producer Eustace Robb, the BBC’s 30-line Television service mounted increasingly elaborate productions of classic ballets. Among his most enthusiastic collaborators was former Diaghilev star Lydia Sokolova, who first adapted the one-act Cléopâtre which Michel Fokine had originally choreographed for Diaghilev in 1909. Sokolova followed up with an adaptation of George Balanchine’s The Gods go a’Begging, and on consecutive Wednesdays 3 and 10 July 1935 a version of Fokine’s 1910 Carnaval, to music by Schumann.
Born Hilda Tansley Munnings in Essex, Sokolova was given her stage name by Diaghilev when she joined his company in 1913. She danced with Nijinsky and led the touring company in Leonide Massine’s celebrated 1920 The Rite of Spring. On Diaghilev’s death, she returned to Britain to teach and choreograph, and to collaborate on early television ballets.
Carnaval seems to have been the most delicate, most exquisite ballet Michel Fokine ever created, as well as the most difficult to pinpoint. As was the case with many of his works, the roles depended to a large degree upon the talents of the original performers, and if one looks at just the steps (except for the one Harlequin solo) they are almost simplistic.
It was the infusion of lightness, gaiety, coyness, and self-absorption, combined with an underlying sadness—all of which must be contributed by the dancers—that resulted in what most critics of the time regarded as a most effective adaptation of Schumann’s music and characters.
The image shows Lydia Sokolova as Columbine, Travis Kemp as Pierrot, Stanley Judson as Eusebius (Kemp and Judson were billed in each other’s role) and, as Pantalon, Algeranoff.
[OTD post no. 205; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
