OTD in early British television: 22 September 1938
John Wyver writes: From time to time it’s worth checking in on the guest list for the magazine series Picture Page, in this case on the evening of Thursday 22 September 1938. The magazine show comprising brief interviews by Leslie Mitchell with a very wide range of guests featured an extraordinary range of the famous and the anonymous, including writers, diplomats, sports persons, screen stars, eccentrics, variety performers, hobbyists and so many others.
Contributors often brought a prop with them, and were mostly spoken with standing in or walking about the studio. They were rigorously prepared for their four minutes or so of fame, and in the early days at least were pretty much expected to learn their answers by heart. Broadcast twice weekly, in both an afternoon and evening edition, Picture Page was the single uncontested studio ‘hit’ of pre-war television, and it returned again in 1946.
To give you a sense of the spread of contributors, the 50-minute edition that started at 9.36pm on 22 September 1938 featured the following nine items:
- Stewart Macpherson introducing the captains of Wembley’s two ice hockey teams for the coming season
- juggler Bob Ripa
- playwright Terrence Rattigan speaking about his new play After the Dance
- scenic artist Leon Davey with his model set for Paprika, which was about to open in the West End
- Cooper Clark, who had been working for thirty years on a translation of the pre-Columbian Mexican ‘Codex Mendoza’
- John Harding, General Manager of the National Spoirting Club, with three boxers whose fights were soon to be featured on television
- Captain Donald Anderson, who collected old and unusual military uniforms and who brought along a helmet and coat belonging to a colonel from the reign of George IV
- architect and critic John Summerson, a member of the MARS group of modernist architects currently presenting their ideas at the Building Exhibition at Olympia
- and Jean Lackey, who described herself as the ‘Vagabond Co-ed’, and who had recently completed a world tour having set out with one shilling and a packet of cigarettes.
Image: the ‘Codex Mendoza’ on display at the Bodleian Library, by Jononmac46 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
[OTD post no. 276; 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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