OTD in early British television: 27 May 1939
John Wyver writes: The Saturday evening schedule on 27 May 1939 was taken over by a production of George H. Grimaldi’s drama Behind the Schemes. The scene was laid in the publicity office of Fleet Street’s (imaginary) Daily Quiver, and for the Times critic the play ‘did not have a dull moment’.
The play had been given at the Richmond Theatre in the autumn of 1938, which is presumably how it came to the attention of AP drama producer Fred O’Donovan (above, in 1951), who the Times writer was happy to credit with the transmission’s success:
Mr Fred O’Donovan thinks in terms of his cameras, which means that viewers never think of them, but only of the story, and his production had pace and clarity.
Fred O’Donovan is a fascinating character, who I started writing about nearly a decade ago in an article for the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, ‘Exploring the lost television and technique of producer Fred O’Donovan’ [link to accepted ms version at WestminsterResearch]. When that came out in 2017 I wrote an Illuminations blog post about Fred, ‘The lost television of Fred O’Donovan’, extracts of which I include here:
In the history of British television drama few notable creative figures are as forgotten as the actor, film director and pioneer producer Fred O’Donovan. After a distinguished career at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, after directing Ireland’s first feature film, and after nearly two decades’ work on the London stage, O’Donovan joined BBC Television in early 1938. As one of the first directors of studio drama he earned a ‘Produced by’ credit on more than 60 broadcasts.
These included plays by the major Irish writers J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey as well as dramas by Eugene O’Neill, Chekhov and Molière. Among the actors with whom he worked were Wendy Hiller, Angela Baddeley, James Mason and Alastair Sim.
On his death in the summer of 1952 O’Donovan was 67, and past the BBC’s usual age of retirement, but he was still employed full-time by the Corporation. Indeed he had just returned from overseeing a French television adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in Paris.
Along with other television drama producers at that time, including Dallas Bower and Stephen Harrison, O’Donovan was a key agent in the fledgling form’s development. With his background in theatre and the cinema he also exemplified the medium’s intermedial engagement with the stage and other media of the day.
According to his contemporaries he also worked with a highly distinctive studio style involving lengthy shots without cuts that was known as the ‘one camera technique’. But to date no moving image trace has been discovered of what at the time was a celebrated body of work…
Writing in 1950 John Swift distinguished O’Donovan’s distinctive strategy from the conventional form of production in which the director used mixes to transition and (when this became technically possible in the mid-1940s) cut between two, three or occasionally four cameras to compose a continuous sequence of shots from different angles and with a range of frame sizes.
‘There is one other system,’ Swift recorded, ‘known as the one-camera technique. It is the speciality of one producer in particular, Fred O’Donovan, who is steeped in stage traditions and to my knowledge has adhered to this method throughout his time as a television producer.’
As Swift recounted, O’Donovan choreographed his cast in front of just a single camera, which would have had only restricted movement, for scenes lasting 20 minutes or more. ‘One-camera production,’ Swift continued, ‘demands the highest degree of precision and when perfect co-ordination is achieved between cast, cameraman and producer the result is often a smoother and more polished presentation than the more complicated many-angle technique.’
Swift, like O’Donovan’s producer peers before and after the war, clearly regarded this approach as a personal idiosyncrasy, but throughout the first years of the medium it was an active and approved alternative to the dominant multi-camera techniques…
More specifically, his ‘one-camera technique’ is a reminder that the production methods and screen languages that were to become dominant in later years, during the ‘mature’ years of multi-camera studio drama from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, were not inherent in the medium from the start. Alternative approaches were developed even if they proved to be roads not taken.
[OTD post no. 161; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
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