OTD in early British television: 26 November 1937
John Wyver writes: A blog post – many months after the last one, and with much to catch up on. I have been prompted to return, at least temporarily, by a kind suggestion from Lawrence Napper on Facebook. Over the past week and more I have been posting on Bluesky On this day (OTD) threads about pre-war television broadcasts which have been researched for my forthcoming book Magic Rays of Light: British Television Between the Wars.
Lawrence suggested that these short threads might work better, and remain accessible longer, as blog posts, and so here we are. I’ll reflect more on Bluesky vs blogging in future posts, but for the moment I’ll just say that these posts, to which I’ll link from social media, will likely often be brief and may seem insubstantial. I hope, however, that collectively they add up to something – and of course that they will prompt interest in the eventual publication in late 2025 of my book. That said, to mark the return here, today’s post is a kind of double-header.
The New Elephant House at the Zoo
The evening schedule on Friday 26 November 1937 is one of those pre-war transmissions that I especially wish was preserved. (There are no extensive recordings of live studio broadcasts from the BBC Television Station at Alexandra Palace before the late 1940s.) At 9.20pm producer Mary Adams presented a short discussion between Dr Julian Huxley, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin. They were especially concerned with Lubetkin’s recent Elephant House at Whipsnade, but in the studio they also had models of his Penguin Pool and Gorilla House, both created for Regent’s Park.
Born in Tblisi, Lubetkin had studied in Moscow and Leningrad, practised in Paris in the 1920s, and emigrated to Britain in 1931 where the following year with like-minded modernists he established the architectural and design practice Tecton. The group’s earliest commissions included the much-admired projects for the Zoological Society [link: a rich ‘Modernism in Metroland’ post].
Lubetkin appeared on pre-war television on one other occasion, in a discussion in February 1939 of Tecton’s Finsbury ARP Plan for Structural Defence [the link is to a fascinating ‘Airminded’ post by Brett Holman]. Here, in the lead-up to the war, he was in conversation with Alderman Harold Riley, a key figure in the creation of Lubetkin and Tecton’s Finsbury Health Centre, and J.P. Bellamy, a resident of the borough.
Between 1936 and 1939, as the television audience built towards an audience of around 80,000 just before closedown on 1 September, Mary Adams offered exposure for numerous modernist artists and architects, including Walter Gropius, Maxwell Fry and Frank Lloyd Wright, along with John Piper, Myfanwy Evans, Paul Nash and Wyndham Lewis. More details of their appearances will follow in future posts.
Eight O’Clock
Following on from the discussion, presumably after a short break to re-set the studio (a British Movietone newsreel was scheduled but was not transmitted), Russell Thorndike (actor, brother of Sibyl, author of the Dr Syn novels) appeared as ‘the condemned man’ in Reginald Berkeley’s one act drama Eight O’Clock. The reliable and often innovative drama producer George More O’Ferrall was at the control desk.
The scene: ‘a condemned cell in Aldgate Prison at 7.30 on a raw winter’s morning’. Filmed exteriors of Holloway Prison were employed to establish the location, along with overlaid ‘Edgware Road traffic’ from a BBC effects record. Just before being taken away to be hanged, a man spends his last half-hour with a priest (played by J. Fisher White). Warders, the prison governor, a doctor and ‘the hangman’ (Eric Noels) also appear. The chaplain tries to make the man commit to God, although the man resists. As the time of his death approaches he is led to believe that there may be hope of a reprieve, so he agrees to kneel and pray; but there is no reprieve and the man is led to his death realising he has been tricked.
Eight O’Clock had originally been staged been staged in the wake of the First World War as part of the Grand Guignol seasons, which following a French model ran from 1920 to 1922 at José Levy’s Little Theatre in London. The author Reginald Berkeley had trained as a lawyer and had worked for a time in Fiji before serving with distinction and being awarded the Military Cross in the First World War.
According to the Australian journal The Triad (10 October 1922), the play was inspired when a client of Berkeley’s was sentenced to death in a Fiji courtroom. The same source notes that when Eight O’Clock was first produced The Atheneum hailed it as ‘the best short play of the season’. The text is reproduced in London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, University of Exeter Press, 2007.
Penguin Pool image: Gillfoto, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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