OTD in early British television: 28 November 1931
John Wyver writes: on the afternoon of this day in 1931, Saturday 28 November, the National Programme of the BBC’s Sound service broadcast a light music recital in a studio at Savoy Hill given by the Gershom Parkington Quintet and tenor Trevor Watkins. The concert on the radio, via the Daventry transmitter, ran from 3.30pm to 4.45pm, but from the start until 4.06pm it was also broadcast by the Baird company’s 30-line television service.
Earlier in 1931 the Baird company had constructed a portable mirror-drum scanner, equipped with lenses of two different focal lengths, which meant that broadcasts could be made away from their Covent Garden studio. Tests with the BBC were carried out in the summer, and mid-October saw the first simultaneous broadcast of a radio programme also shown on television. Jack Payne and his BBC dance band were featured in a late-night broadcast. ‘For the first time in the history of the BBC,’ noted the Daily Telegraph, ‘television was included as part of the normal broadcasting programme last night.’
By this stage the Baird company was transmitting Monday through Friday for a half-hour each morning. To this demanding schedule were now added broadcasts of parts of BBC radio broadcasts on Saturdays. Three 10-minute segments of A Light Concert were shown on the afternoon on 24 October, and there were further light music simulcasts, of which the 28 November broadcast with the Gershom Parkington Quintet was one, roughly once a week up to Christmas.
The workings of the scanner meant that the studio performances had to be given in total darkness. Close-ups of individual musicians could be mixed to and from wider shots from the single camera, but the image resolution was inevitably crude.
According to a 1940 Radio Times billing, ‘Gershom Parkington, whose Quintet was one of the earliest light-music combinations to broadcast, is a virtuoso cellist of considerable musical experience. Apart from solo. work and chamber music, he was for several seasons conductor and musical director at Scarborough, and during his earlier days he was a member of the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra and other famous London orchestras.’
Courtesy of the invaluable Internet Archive, Trevor Watkins can be heard performing a number of songs here.
The final musical simulcast of this kind was a Haydn programme in mid-April 1932, by which point the BBC was in the process of taking over the Television broadcasts, as occurred in the summer. Transmissions under the control of the Baird company ceased on Friday 17 June.
In a further intermedial felicity, the Gershom Parkington Quintet is shown briefly in the 1934 British feature film Death at Broadcasting House (from which the header image is a screen shot). This was scripted by the BBC’s head of production at the time Val Gielgud, who was later to have a brief unhappy period as the corporation’s head of television drama. More about the film and its largely accurate depiction of BH in the mid-1930s, along with other great screen grabs, can be found at the Rank and File British cinema blog.
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