OTD in early British television: 27 March 1939
John Wyver writes: On Monday 27 March 1939 television visited His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, for a three-hour relay, produced by Dallas Bower, of Magyar Melody, a romance set in Hungary with book and music co-written by the BBC’s former director of variety, Eric Maschwitz. This was the third live broadcast of a full-length West End show, following When We Are Married and Twelfth Night.
Writing evocatively in The Listener, Grace Wyndham Goldie was clear that she approved, albeit with a qualification or two:
Well, you can do it. You can sit at home in your own armchair in Kent or Sussex with the owls hooting in the elms outside your window and watch the performance of London stars in a London musical comedy in a London theatre. Here, in fact, is the moment for which we have all been waiting. It arrived last week with the success of Magyar Melody.
For Wyndham Goldie this ‘was infinitely the most effective “direct from the theatre” show that we have had yet.’
The camera work, the lighting, the clearness of the pictures were all at least as good as we get in the majority of studio plays and far better than we get in some. We saw beautifully. We heard beautifully. And we had a far closer view of the costumes and singers and dancers and the chorus, and, in particular of that enchanting comedienne, Miss Binnie Hale, than we should have had from the front row of the stalls.
But… shows of this kind were meant for large audiences watching together in a huge theatre, whereas
ln television they are received by tiny audiences having a night at home. The difference in result is astonishing. For to us, watching·at home, every effect was too broad, every gesture too large, every tone too emphatic.
What’s the moral of all this? First, that seeing productions ‘direct from the theatre’ is extraordinarily interesting but, oh all ye theatrical managers and fellow viewers, it isn’t going to stop people going to the theatre.
Second, which I confess equally delights my heart, is that ‘direct from the theatre’ shows cannot replace studio plays. Television isn’t going to be merely a channel through which we can see the theatre at home. It is going to be a new dramatic medium with its own possibilities, its own writers, its own technique and its own plays.
For the Observer critic the transmission was ‘another technical triumph for the mobile unit.’ But like Wyndham Goldie they wanted to reassure sceptical theatre managers. ‘Is there one of us,’ they wrote, ‘who saw the show by our firesides that has not determined to go to His Majesty’s at the earliest possible moment and have the colour added to the delights of fine acting, dancing, grouping and scenery.’
There was also one facinating wrinkle about the broadscast. The dim lighting of the drama’s duel scene proved too much of a challenge for the Emitrons in the theatre, and so the visuals of this scene’s staging were ‘doubled’ in the AP studio while the broadcast continued to carry the theatre’s audio. According to one observer watching the broadcast at the theatre, ‘The doubling was timed so perfectly that viewers were unaware of the switch-over from stage to studio.’
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