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 more
John Wyver writes: Responding to the full-length drama given on the evening of Sunday 9 July 1939, Grace Wyndham Goldie in her column for The Listener did not hide her judgement from her readers:
There were half-a-dozen curious things aboutmore
John Wyver writes: In its first month of operation the Television service from Alexandra Palace presented extracts from a theatre production of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. But the new medium's real engagement with the major playwrights of the more
John Wyver writes: 'Television seen 200 miles away' ran the heading of a front-page story in The Era on Thursday 7 July 1938, along with the sub-heard, 'Paris received on the South Downs'. And the report continued,
Startling possibilities aremore
John Wyver writes: 'Fashion' in programmes from pre-war Alexandra Palace invariably meant clothes for women, but there was an outlier on the evening of Tuesday 6 July 1937. Men's Dress Reform was a 17-minute programme produced by Mary Adams looking more
John Wyver writes: Tucked in at the end of the afternoon's programming on Monday 5 July 1937 is a curious three-minute 'local OB' titled The Coronation Train. Goodness knows that the result was like but, with commentary by Leslie Mitchell, more
John Wyver writes: The late-night 30-line broadcast on Tuesday 4 July 1933 featured alongside comedian Sydney Arnold and Olive Groves with songs from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, the Russo-Finnish dancer Cleo Nordi. Trained in St Petersburg, she had more
John Wyver writes: Stage representations of the Great War were rare in the first decade after the Armistice, and it was R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, which became a major hit after its premiere in late December 1928, that defined the more
John Wyver writes: For just over an hour on the afternoon of Sunday 2 July 1939 OB cameras from Scanner 2 (its counterpart was at Wimbledon) relayed the parade of National Service organisations in Hyde Park. Some 20,000 volunteers marched more
John Wyver writes: Lookers-in on the evening of Saturday 1 July 1939 were treated to a 50-minute anthology of scenes from literature about the law. Compiled by Barbara Nixon and produced by Desmond Davis, this followed on from a more