OTD in early British television: 23 July 1930
John Wyver writes: The line-up for the Baird Television transmission at 11am on the morning of Wednesday 23 July 1930 featured, as usual, a trio of entertainers. Scottish (although billed as ‘Scotch’) music hall comedian Tommy Lorne was up first, then baritone Frederick Yule, later to be an ITMA cast member during the war, followed by soprano Elsie Otley.
Each contributed an approximately 10-minute turn, standing in the scanner’s beam in a blacked-out studio so that their head and shoulders, along with their voice, were reproduced on a few hundred tiny, portrait-formatted 30-line screens across the country.
The Covent Garden studio at the time was transmitting a half-hour each weekday morning, along with an additional Friday half-hour at midnight. Broadcasts of this kind, with an occasional OB or drama like The Man with the Flower in his Mouth the previous week, had been offered with synchronous sound and vision for nearly four months now. They would continue until 1 July 1932, after which the BBC took over responsibility.
In an April 1930 article looking ahead to these synchronous transmissions, Baird confidant Sydney Moseley sought to manage expectations. ‘Lookers-in must remember,’ he wrote, ‘that it is not the intention of the Baird company to put over a fulsome programme.’ The broadcasts were primarily technical, he suggested.
That was also the BBC’s position, with a corporation official stressing that neither they nor the Postmaster General were responsible for content or technical quality. ‘As far as we are concerned,’ said the flack, ‘these broadcasts are purely experimental, and do not rank as “programmes” at all.’
‘For the moment,’ Moseley predicted, ‘there will probably be three items per transmission, allowing on average ten minutes for each artist, which is enough.’ Baird described the programmes as ‘an abbreviated music-hall’, and the idea of a cut-down version of a variety bill was to persist.
Engineer Tony Bridgewater often acted as on-screen host, attired in a dinner jacket and bow-tie because
we’d heard that all the BBC announcers wore dinner jackets so I thought the smart thing was to do this on television.
Meanwhile, Baird himself relished the romance of this venture, as he recalled in his notes towards an autobiography:
I remember how strange it was to come down from the cold, austere laboratory to the exotic atmosphere of the studio, mysterious with young females floating about in tights, red nosed comedians applying greasepaint and violinists rehearsing, and all the colourful chaos of backstage.
Indeed, he first met his future wife, Margaret Albu, when she came in to accompany another performer.
As for the line-up on 23 July 1930, I’m assuming that Elsie Otley is the same person who later became a continuity announcer for BBC’s West of England Home Service, and who can be seen in the above photograph, taken from the Broadcasting the West blog. Can anyone confirm?
[OTD post no. 218; 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