OTD in early British television: 23 September 1938
John Wyver writes: Over the weekend of Friday 23 and Saturday 24 September 1938, the BBC’s mobile unit made a return visit to Pinewood film studios for three OB broadcasts. Pinewood was the location for the first and most successful of three groups of OBs from London’s film studios a year previously, and this return offered the opportunity not only to attract a little more of the silver screen’s stardust but also to employ the unit’s improved cameras in a nightime interior from the ‘Pinewood Ball’.
Friday afternoon, when a 20-minute broadcast was hosted by Tod Rich, included an appearance by Elizabeth Bergner; the shooting of a test for So This is London, a comedy being made by 20th Century Fox’s British subsidiary; and shots of the filming of a scene from the drama short Beyond Our Horizon.
Broadcasting from 10.10pm from the Pinewood Ball held in the studio’s Club was considerably more challenging. Actors Valeire Hobson, Joan Gardner and Lucille Lille were interviewed by Leslie Mitchell, as were director Thornton Freeland and producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, along with ‘Bill the barman’.
Some of these exchanges were shot at tables surrounding the dance floor, and it’s clear from internal memos that the scenes were pretty chaotic. Moreover, the sound balance was poor, with Marius Winter’s band drowning out much of the chat. It seems to have been something of a relief when Trudi Binar contributed two songs.
On Saturday afternoon there was a coda in the form of a short OB with members of the Pinewood Gun Club demonstrating the sport of ‘skeet shooting’, and in the evening there was a transmission explaining the idea of ‘rushes’from the projection room of Theatre No.2. But the unsatisfactory nature of the cameras being at the Ball seems to have meant that no further return visits to film studios were undertaken in the final year of pre-war television.
[OTD post no. 277; 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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