OTD in early British television: 12 July 1938
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.
The five-episode series was adapted from three radio plays first broadcast in 1932-33. ‘The Scanner’ promised that the serial was
not the sort of thing that will leave you panting for breath and impatient for what is to come in the next instalment. But I think you will look forward to Tuesdays all the same—that is, as long as you are not an out-and-out cynic.
Taking in the couple’s engagement, marriage and first quarrel, this tale of a modern couple appears to have been comfortable and conventional, with the Observer‘s ‘E.H.R.’ writing that it ’meanders along its charming and inconsequent way’.
At the end of the war Ann Todd achieved stardom opposite James Mason in the 1945 melodrama The Seventh Veil, and then took the lead in three films directed by her second husband, David Lean: The Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine (1950) and The Sound Barrier (1952). She and Lean divorced in 1957. Although he appeared regularly on pre-war television, no such heady heights awaited William Hutchison in his later career.
[OTD post no. 207; 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.]
You say ‘no such heights’ fo wWilliam Hutchison, but a quick IMBd search shows he was also MP for Romford from ’31-35, and appeared in another TV drama, The White Chateau, which had verse by Auden, Eliot, Pound et al. Maybe a future post on that? Sounds intriguing…
The White Chateau is definitely a subject for a future post, Ian, but we need to wait for the OTD marking Armistice Day 1938. The drama had first been broadcast on radio on the same day of commemoration in 1925, and was the sound medium’s first full-length original drama (and I’m rather pleased to own a copy of the published script). It follows the fortunes of a family home in France, which is seen across the years of the war as an Army headquarters, a heap of rubble, and, finally, the site of a field hospital.