Blog

OTD in early British television: 15 April 1939

15th April 2025

John Wyver writes: Lest these posts give the impression that pre-war television from Alexandra Palace was all classical ballet and mimed Wagner, the evening of Saturday 15 April 1939 was one of seven occasions when the studio hosted Indian magician Kuda Bux, otherwise known as ‘the man with the X-ray eyes’. Just as it does today, television loved a soupçon of sensationalism.

For JStor Daily, Caitlin Renee Miller provides an introduction:

Over the course of eight decades, Kuda Bux, a self-styled “Hindu mystic,” was a point of intersection for vaudeville, Roald Dahl, spiritualism, paranormal research, precursors to reality TV, the allure of the East, bad PR, brilliant PR, radio programs that needed a time delay, and yogic concentration.

Kuda Bux was one of British television’s most exotic pre-war performers, along with Koringa, to whom we will doubtless return, along with firewalking. Born in the Punjab in 1905, Bux arrived in England in May 1935. His act, which television showcased on each of seven appearances, involved volunteers covering his eyes with dough, bandages and other obstructions, and then having him reading from books, identifying numbers, threading a needle and playing billiards. Although this was not done for television, he even rode a bicycle blind-folded down a busy street.

In August 1939, Radio Times trailed one of his television appearances in this way:

Whatever the viewer’s private opinion on the subject of fakirs may be, here once again is a chance for him to examine the evidence with his own eyes. Kuda Bux can perform feats that seem to fall under the heading of the wholly impossible, and tonight he will once again perform one of the most remarkable of them all. With his eyes completely bound up he is able to see exactly what is going on before him. Explain it away if you can—but there it is!

Caitlin Renee Miller relates how his supposed powers were put to the test by the famed sceptic Harry Price:

Price sent Bux an invitation to take part in an experiment he would lead scheduled for July 10, 1935, in the séance room at the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation. Bux agreed and was insistent: seeing without his eyes was no trick. It took more than a decade of intense meditation to develop his powers, he claimed, and under meticulous laboratory conditions, he intended to prove it.

“We commenced the proceedings by squeezing a lump of dough into each eye-socket,” Price wrote in Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, and with the help of tape, bandages, a black mask, and cotton pads, Bux’s “head and face were swathed… only the nostrils and mouth free. He was now ready to demonstrate” that he could see without eyes. The investigators, six in total, opened book after book and laid them in front of Bux. He read from their pages instantly.

Astonished, the researchers unbandaged and re-bandaged Bux—the results did not change. Bux read from handwritten notes, including one written behind him (though Price believed his subject could have turned slightly in his chair). Bux’s one outright failure was his inability to tell if the lights were on or off after the researchers covered his already voluminous head with a layer of black cloth. 

Bux later moved to the United States, and in 1953 he was profiled by Roald Dahl in a feature in Argosy magazine. Dahl later used this, including verbatim quotes, for his tale ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’, which Wes Anderson filmed for Netflix in 2023 with Benedict Cumberbatch as the title character.

In breathless fashion, Caitlin Renee Miller details Kuda Bux’s later life:

As entertainment evolved, so did Kuda Bux. But for the remainder his career – the 1938 fire walk in New York City (his final performance of that particular feat), broadcast over the radio for the program Ripley’s Believe It or Not; an appearance on the first episode of Ripley’s TV incarnation; Bux’s own short-lived television show, Kuda Bux, Hindu Mystic; the television show You Asked for It! (“TV’s most varied variety show,” according to TV Guide in 1954), which was deluged with requests for Bux to appear (producers reported nearly 10,000 viewers wrote in hoping to see Bux’s x-ray vision for themselves); a return to radio on “Long John” Nebel’s all-night show devoted to the paranormal, a program so unpredictable it was rumored to be a reason for the invention of radio broadcast delay; performances at the illustrious Magic Castle in Hollywood, which continued until his death in 1981; two performances on tour with Joan Rivers as his assistant (her first job after graduating from Barnard College); through all the fame and his big, big life—Bux always maintained his gift was real: “All I know is that it depends entirely on an inner faculty of the mind. I see with the mind’s eye—with my intense concentrative powers.”

Thrillingly, at some point after he reached the United States, Kuda Bux was filmed for a newsreel item, the British version of which Pathé has made available online (and which is the source of the header screenshot). The pace of his television appearances from AP was doubtless a lot slower, but the substance of his act may have been much as it is immortalised here: