OTD in early British television: 27 August 1939
John Wyver writes: The evening of Sunday 27 August 1939 saw the first performance of Michael Barry’s production (on which he was assisted by Eric Crozier) of the comedy A Cup of Happiness by Eden Philpotts (above). Leon M. Lion, Roger Livesey and Janet Johnson headed the cast. The planned repeat, scheduled for Monday 4 September, was one of the first casualties of television’s wartime shutdown which began at lunchtime on Friday.
All-but-forgotten now, Philpotts was an extraordinarily prolific writer whose novels and plays were mostly set in his home county of Devon. Agatha Christie was a friend and admirer, and among his unlikely fans was Jorge Luis Borges, who rev iewed at least two of his novels.
If Philpotts is remembered now, it may be as the author of the play on which Alfred Hitchcock’s silent feature The Farmer’s Wife (1928) is based, but it is as likely to be because of his incestuous relationship with his daughter Adelaide, which apparently lasted from when she was five or six until she was in her early thirties. Adelaide also collaborated with Eden on several of his works.
The action of A Cup of Happiness takes place on Willowbrook Farm at High Holberton in Devon, and so designer Barry Learoyd was tasked with suggesting a rural setting that was rare for plays from AP. Almost all of the modern drama that was played was set in the city, whether London or an urban location across the Atlantic. Philpotts’ drama was rare among early television plays in being set in the English countryside.
[OTD post no. 253; 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.]
As a complement to the account above, here is an extract from Michael Barry’s memoir 1992 From the Palace to the Grove. Barry had been rehearsing A Cup of Happiness ahead of its 27 August presentation:
‘On the morning of 24 August I had just arrived outside the rehearsal rooms at Beaumont Mews, off Marylebone High Street, when a friend drove up with a telegram that had arrived ordering me to report immediately to the Duke of York’s barracks. After phoning Alexandrsa Palace, I went home, changed into the brown dungarees that were the workaday uniform of other ranks – and reported…
Eric Crozier took over and presented my programme – while I spent the days digging trenches in Hyde Park and confined to barracks, slept on concrete beside the signal’s equipment.’