OTD in early British television: 28 August 1939
John Wyver writes: On the evening of Monday 28 August 1939, just five days before television’s closedown, producer John Pudney’s radio feature Modern Pastoral, about the coming of electricity to the Essex hamlet of Duton Hill, went out on the National Programme.
In a remarkable cross-media stunt Pudney arranged for a group of villagers, including the vicar Rev Sidney Spray, publican John Donnelly and roadman Harry Green, to come to Alexandra Palace to sit before the studio cameras as they listened to their own voices on the airwaves.
The fifteen minute broadcast, titled Up from the Country and produced by Mary Adams, also included a documentary film sequence of of life in Duton Hill, and was planned to feature a short introduction by Pudney. But despite Pudney having also produced television broadcasts at AP, because the programme began unexpectedly early, he missed the transmission.
The remarkable photograph of the occasion seems to capture a moment when a way of life that had changed little in several hundred years encountered modernity’s media world.
[OTD post no. 254; 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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