OTD in early British television: 20 July 1937
John Wyver writes: On the afternoon of 20 July 1937 the BBC television service mounted a new presentation of Luigi Pirandello‘s oblique modernist dialogue The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. Just over seven years before, as we saw in a recent blog post, this one-act drama had been produced by Lance Sieveking for Baird company. Now Jan Bussell was the producer, working with a cast of William Devlin, Philip Thornley and Genitha Halsey.
Beyond its sinple staging requirements, the popularity of the Pirandello is hard to account for, especially when we also factor in a third production, like the first for the 30-line service, and also produced by Bussell, but in this case with marionettes (above).
Working with his life partner Ann Hogarth, who was later to give the world Muffin the Mule, Bussell gave The Man… on the morning of Thursday 2 April 1931, when 30-line transmissions were still being produced by the Baird company. As the rare photograph from Television shows, Bussell and Hogarth conjured up a noir-inflected setting for this eccentric puppet Pirandello.
[OTD post no. 215; 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.]
I just came across this account of the 1937 broadcast in Television magazine:
‘Viewers who can remember the early television production of the play will be impressed by the contrast in production methods. In the old days only one camera could be used and it could not track forwards or backwards. In producing “The Man
with a Flower in his Mouth,” Royston Morley employed all the devices of modern television and introduced a concealed camera taking shots through the window.’
Note that while Morley was scheduled to produce the transmission, according to the PasB Jan Bussell stepped in at the last moment.