OTD in early British television: 12 September 1939
John Wyver writes: It’s Tuesday 12 September 1939, and we are a week and two days into the war. Television came off the air on the Friday before Neville Chamberlain’s declaration, but thanks to the excellent work of Andrew S. Martin in his monumental seven-volume Sound & Vision collection, published by Kaleidoscope, we know what the service was planning, at least in outline terms, through to 21 October.
For this Tuesday the service had in mind an OB from a West End theatre, which according to an earlier item by ‘The Scanner’ in Radio Times, was to be from the premiere of I Can Take It, starring Jessie Matthews (above) and her husband Sonnie Hale. Following a successful provincial tour, this had been scheduled to open tonight at the London Coliseum, but the war had led also to its cancellation.
The OB appears to have been planned along the lines of a previous one, in November 1938, from Under Your Hat at the Palace Theatre, which had Leslie Mitchell interviewing celebrity arrivals, interviewing the stars in their dressing rooms, and then transmitting early scenes from the show.
[OTD post no. 269; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
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