Coming up…
John Wyver writes: In case any of the below is of interest, I thought it might be useful to detail the events I’m involved with over the coming months. It would be very good to see any of you present at any of them. The links in the titles of each element will take you to further details.
• Magic Rays of Light – A Talk for the Art Deco Society: In the evening of 17 March I am giving an online talk about British television of the 1920s and 1930s for the Art Deco Society. This will draw on my research for the recently published Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, and I’m aiming to provide an accessible and enjoyable overview along with a host of rare illustrations. The header image, of course, is Starlight by Harry Rutherford, a detail of which graves the book’s cover.
• Robert Vas in Context: I am contributing a paper to a one-day symposium on Friday 27 March at Birkbeck, University of London about the great documentary filmmaker Robert Vas. My paper will look at Vas’s films and and the films of Humphrey Jennings, who Vas greatly admired.
More details about this event will go online next week, along with tickets for a rare screening that evening of Vas’s film Nine Days in ’26, about the 1926 General Strike, which Vas made to mark the fiftieth anniversary in 1976. I will also contribute an introduction to the screening, which we believe will be the first time in fifty years that this remarkable 95-minute film has been shown in its entirety.
• British Silent Film Festival Symposium: My paper ‘British television and the end times of silent cinema, 1928-1930’ will be the final offering to this day of exceptional presentations at The Cinema Museum on Friday 10 April. As usual, this annual one day event will feature a range of papers of original research on all areas of film culture in Britain and areas affected by British colonialism before 1930. Tickets are available now for £20, with some concessions.
• The Cultures of Early Television: Looking a little further ahead, I am organising this two-day international conference on 2 and 3 July at the University of Westminster. The event is intended to initiate a transnational dialogue about television in the years before World War Two.
Speakers from Britain, continental Europe and North America will explore the cultural ideas and achievements of the first years of the medium. Central to the programme of presentations and discussions addressed to aspects of television in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, central Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as to the screenings of rare archival material, is the development of intermedial understandings of early television’s close entanglements with the radio, cinema, theatre, dance and visual arts of the first half of the twentieth century.
Thursday 2 and Friday 3 July 2026, Portland Hall, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7BY; again, more details and registration will be available very soon, but if you are interested send me an e-mail at [email protected] and I’ll make sure to keep you informed.
• Shakespeare on the Radio: A Century of BBC Plays: I have also just reviewed Andrea Smith’s new study, published by Edinburgh University Press, for Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television; the first 50 clicks on the link will access a free .pdf.
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