OTD in early British television: 15 June 1937
John Wyver writes: There are notes about pre-war television broadcasts when a historian looking back can only respond with an exclamation of something like ‘WTF’. One of those has to be a 12-minute studio talk on the evening of Tuesday 15 June 1937 about ‘The Future of Television’ given by the Irish writer James Stephens (above).
Talks producer Mary Adams was only two months into her job when she started this series in April with Megan Lloyd George in the studio. Gerald Barry, editor of the News Chronicle, had contributed his thoughts, as had the writer S.P.B. Mais. But what was she thinking of when she booked the Irish mystical poet Stephens?
A committed Irish Republican, author of the influential account of the 1916 Easter Rising, Insurrection in Dublin, Stephens became a close friend of James Joyce. At one point, when he was concerned that he might not be able to complete what became Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce apparently proposed that he should collaborate on it with Stephens.
Stephens made a number of radio broadcasts in the late 1920s and early 1930s speaking about poetry, but there appears to be little in his biography that suggests he had interesting views about television. Frustratingly, we have no script of what he offered, apart from the fact that he concluded with a recitation of five of his poems including ‘The Main Deep’ and ‘The Voice of God’. Which in 12 minutes cannot have left much time for tackling the future of the medium on which he was speaking.
Image: Portrait of James Stephens in 1935 by Los Angeles Times – licenced CC BY 4.0. (Forgive the large size – I just think it’s a great photograph.)
[OTD post no. 180; 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.]
Leave a Reply