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OTD in early British television: 14 July 1930

14th July 2025

John Wyver writes: Ninety-five years ago today, for 26 minutes from 3.30pm on the afternoon of Monday 14 July 1930, The Man with the Flower in his Mouth by Luigi Pirandello was broadcast. This is unquestionably a significant anniversary, since this was a pioneering drama transmission overseen by the visionary producer Lance Sieveking and co-produced by the Baird company and the BBC.

But this is not the anniversary of Britain’s first television drama, although the production has long been thought to be exactly that. Rather, that accolade belongs to Box and Cox, shown on 15 December 1928, as an earlier blog post detailed. Nonetheless here is part of the story of The Man…, in an edited extract from my forthcoming Magic Rays of Light.

‘It was I,’ claimed Baird associate and promoter Sydney Moseley with typical self-importance, ‘who suggested the production of the first television play.’ But the specific idea came from BBC executive Val Gielgud. A note dated 3 April 1930 proposed the Pirandello as a way ‘to watch the various developments [in the Baird operation] from our own point of view’.

This was all of a piece with the growing awareness that the BBC should go beyond simply providing technical assistance and become more involved with output. A month later Control Board decided that Gielgud’s request, with producer Lance Sieveking now attached, could proceed ‘free of charge’. As long, that is, as Baird Television did not use the project ‘for undue publicity’.

Sibling of the celebrated actor John, thirty-year-old Val Gielgud had been the BBC’s director of productions, with responsibility for all drama and variety, for just over a year. ‘With unfailing judgement for the requirements of a new medium,’ Sieveking remembered, ‘Val chose Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. It had only three characters and was very static.’

The Italian modernist playwright had been gaining a reputation in Britain since the war, and in 1925 the company of the Arts Theatre in Rome (at the head of which Benito Mussolini had installed the writer) came to London for a season.

Round midnight, in a café by a train station, ‘the Man’ strikes up a conversation with another patron, ‘the Customer’, who has missed his train and is nursing a peppermint frappé. The latter listens as the Man launches into a fervid stream of consciousness, speaking about gazing fixedly at salespersons wrapping parcels, and about ‘the need to latch on – by the skin of my… imagination – to the lives of others.’ He points to a woman in black almost obscured in a corner, who he says is his wife obsessively observing him.

The Man further explains that Death has planted a malignant epithelioma under his lip and he has only months to live. Staring at virtuosic shop assistants and the like is all that keeps him from shooting someone. Finally, the Man asks that when the Customer completes his journey he count the blades of grass in the first tuft he finds. This will be the number of days before his death. ‘One last request,’ he laughs. ‘Pick a big tuft!’

The Man with the Flower in his Mouth is dark, at times defiantly opaque, misogynistic, and yet with an exhortation of carpe diem at its heart. In the Man’s imagining of looking into the lives of others, and in the Woman’s relentless gaze, might there be a pre-echo of how television will come to be an object of fascination and of fear? ‘You’ve no idea how my imagination functions,’ he says. ‘I work my way in. In! I get to see this man’s house – or that man’s, I live in it, I feel I belong there.’

Making such a connection probably credits Gielgud with more self-awareness than is justified. Even so, and recognising the pragmatic necessity for a play of modest scale, The Man with the Flower in his Mouth was a strikingly eccentric selection.

Given the green light for The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, Sieveking spent some days adapting the play ‘so as to get as much movement as possible in the few inches available on the tiny screen, which was little bigger than a postcard.’ He also commissioned four panels of boldly sketched ‘scenery’ from the modernist painter C.R.W. (‘Richard’) Nevinson (one of which can be seen above).

In his radio productions Sieveking had developed a ‘mosaic’ style that was greatly influenced by the contemporary cinema, especially films from Germany and the Soviet Union. As David Hendy has written of his work,

if there was a defining feature to this new art [of radio], it was its ability to do with time what film directors had done with space – namely to fracture perspective and chronology through dramatic switches between “close-up” and “long-shot”, through sudden changes of scene, and so on.

With the constraints of a tiny, fixed frame, minimal depth-of-field and low resolution, the opportunities for Sieveking to translate these ideas for television were exceptionally limited, yet he determined to try.

A preview of the transmission, which was to be a radio broadcast as well, explained that ‘the visible side will be made up of printed captions, scenery, the heads and shoulders of the speakers, close-ups of their hands, and objects which are related to the play.’ Clearly briefed by Sieveking, another previewer wrote that

in the broadcast the spectator will follow the thoughts and words which an actor is expressing. The conversation will continue, but the eye will be led on to watch the motion of hands and other objects about which the voice is talking.

The two rehearsals also allowed stage manager Mary Eversley to experiment with make-up, deciding on yellow and a darker brown as a basis with a liner highlighting eyes, cheekbones and the mouth. After the rehearsals with Earle Grey, who played the Man, Lionel Millard, the Customer, and Gladys Young, Sieveking wrote:

The cast seemed to enjoy every minute…, getting a lot of amusement from the fact that in order to show them sitting one on each side of the table their heads had to be actually touching, and even then only half of each head was visible.

The producer believed that he was working through fundamental issues about how television might develop. ‘I have devised a production method and a television dramatic script,’ Sieveking noted just before the transmission, ‘which I hope may be the foundation of the future technique.’ Overall, Baird engineer Tony Bridgewater, who was in the control room at Long Acre for the 3.30pm transmission, was impressed by the seriousness of the BBC team, as he recalled,

They exploited this very crude medium to the utmost, much more than anybody amongst the Baird people ever thought of doing or conceived possible.

Not that everyone on the BBC side was enthusiastic, as historian Asa Briggs recorded:

Only one figure could be projected at a time and that figure could scarcely move. The focus was still uncertain and variable. George Inns, a 16-year-old trainee who arranged the effects, felt that it was all very primitive and that television had no future.

Only a few hundred Televisors could receive the broadcast, but radio dealers were alerted to encourage lookers-in to view this special transmission. One correspondent wrote that,

I had to rely on the apparatus at a multiple store. This could only be seen by one person at a time; as there were over a hundred waiting… our time before the machine was limited, and I… arrived before the screen at the instant of a fade out.

The most detailed review of the production was penned by the drama critic of The Times:

When – as does once happen in the present performance,’ they wrote, ‘we see the face of The Man and, at the same time, the back of The Customer’s head, the two actors are, we understand, within a few inches of each other. These are conditions such as the most intimate of Intimate Theatres have never dreamed of.’ 

Having viewed part of the broadcast on a Televisor screen, the Times critic joined around 40 others in a makeshift viewing tent on the roof of the Baird building. There they looked at the broadcast on an innovative 2,100 lamp large-screen display, measuring five feet high by two feet wide, which is also where Sieveking watched.

As Sieveking later recalled,

From first to last the audience never stirred or made a sound. I think there was something in all their minds, which gave them the ability to see beyond that which their physical eyes and ears were receiving, something which does come upon groups of people sometimes, and which is called prophetic… At the end, Mr. Baird, Mr. Gielgud, Mr. Moseley and I looked at each other in silence.

The Times correspondent was less messianic, writing that

coming out of the long, low tent at the end of which the apparatus was set up, we did feel… that we had been watching a cinema of the future… Men of the theatre may meanwhile rest in peace, The time for interest and curiosity is come, but the time for serious criticism of television plays, as plays, is not yet.

[OTD post no. 209; 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.]