OTD in early British television: 23 August 1939
John Wyver writes: Late August means it’s time for the annual trade show Radiolympia. Manufacturers and consumers gathered for a week or so in west London to look at the latest radio and television receivers and to be entertained by the BBC. 1938’s Radiolympia, which we will also visit in the coming days, had been significant for the boost it gave to sales of televisions, and there were similar hopes for 1939. Although, of course, there was also the profound awareness of the likelihood of war.
One of the popular attractions in 1938, both at the fair and in the broadcasts made from there, was the daily ‘Come and Be Televised’ hour, which was repeated in 1939. On the first morning, Wednesday 23 August, Jasmine Bligh spoke with, among others, Mr G.H. Ripley about bookbinding, Miss V. Batchelor with her Welsh corgi puppy, and memory pianist Mr. W. Whittaker.
In a preview of the 1939 show in the monthly Television, correspondent L. Marsland Gander reflected on one of the differences between 1938 and 1939:
Mr Harold Cox, the producer of the feature ‘Come and Be Televised’ at Radiolympia, tells me that he is faced this year with a problem precisely opposite to that which troubled him last August.
At the last show (pictured below, with Elizabeth Cowell) members of the public were so shy of facing the cameras that for two or three days he was at his wits’ end to find people who wanted to be televised. After a harassing first day he was reduced to ringing up friends on the telephone and imploring them to help him out. Later on things improved.
This year the B.B.C. issued an early invitation to the public to send written applications to Alexandra Palace. The result was that at the time of writing Mr. Cox was wading through the best part of ,a thousand letters.
One reason for the deluge appears to be that most of the writers were under the mistaken impression that the B.B.C. intended to pay them. Actually, the B. B.C. proposes to do nothing of the sort and in fact will not even pay expenses.
Amateur sopranos and raconteurs were in the majority among the applicants. Some had taken part in the Spanish civil war, but there were people with every sort of experience from big game hunting to service in the Foreign Legion.
Six hairdressers wrote (all independently) offering to demonstrate how they had cut the hair of various famous people. Some fifty mothers told the B.B.C. they had offspring who were second Shirley Temples. One lady of seventy-five offered to give a display of physical culture. There were innumerable professionals, chiefly instrumentalists and acrobats, for whom the invitation was not strictly intended.
The setting for ‘Come and Be Televised’ will be a drawing room, in which Jasmine Bligh will preside over the morning coffee-pot, and talk informally to her visitors. Each item will be a friendly chat more than an interview, and there wi!l be no pageboy to introduce the arrivals, as last year.
[OTD post no. 249; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
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