OTD in early British television: 17 December 1936
John Wyver writes: Thursday 17 December 1936 saw an edition of one of the first television series, London Characters. In a 7-minute broadcast shown both mid-afternoon and mid-evening, John Snuggs, ‘the troubadour’, demonstrated paper tearing with his partner accordionist, Van Hornibrook. Others who featured in this occasional and ultimately short-lived strand (there were just five shows) included ex-Pipe Major Massie, ‘the bagpipes man from Trafalgar Square (pictured, in a framegrab from the BBC Television Demonstration Film); John Cairns, street busker; Hansom cabman Albert Frisbee; Alf the shrimper; and Jack Smith, tomato seller.
Director of television Gerald Cock had had the idea to showcase figures from the London streets in this way. In a memo written in early September 1935, more than a year before the service from Alexandra Palace went on the air, Cock outlined ideas that might make possible series:
Each such programme would take about fifteen to twenty minutes and show four to five individuals. Eventually these series programmes would be at weekly intervals at the same time on the same day of the week to establish continuity.
His notions included Press Personalities, Writers of To-day, From the Theatre, Films in the Making, The World of Sport, London Characters, In the News, Broadcast Parade, Contemporary Musicians, The Zoo To-day, and What’s New in the Shops.
Visitors from London Zoo was realised as a strand, but under another title, and of the others, only London Characters reached the screen, and even then the chaos of the early schedules prevented a weekly slot being established.
The journalist J.C. Cannell, who was involved in selecting these figures, undertook a similar search for the radio series In Town Tonight (1933-60), but the realisation, albeit transplanted to an anonymous studio, in some ways echoed Victorian photographer John Thomson’s images of the urban working-class collected in the 1877 volume Street Life in London.
Although London Characters as a strand had only a short life, the idea of presenting ‘typical’ London figures from the working classes, often sentimentalising or exoticising their poverty, was incorporated into the weekly magazine Picture Page, as with Harry Haynes, ‘the muffin man’ (below, also from the BBC Television Demonstration Film), who appeared in that show on 30 December 1936.
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