OTD in early British television: 28 November 1938
John Wyver writes: Between an appearance by the ventriloquist D’Anselmi and a short programme called The Accompanist Speaks, with pianist Ivor Newton, television’s main offering on the evening of Monday 28 November 1938 was the second edition (above) of the series Guest Night. Host A.G. Street, who was a noted author and farmer as well as a regular broadcaster, and producer Mary Adams gathered together five distinguished figures to discuss houses – ‘what they should look like inside and out, their arrangement in cities, and their place in the country’.
Assembled in a studio set of a well-appointed and comfortable drawing room were Merlin Minshall, Serge Chermayeff, Duncan Miller, John Gloag and Maxwell Fry. Discussion programmes featuring multiple participants were Adams’ innovation and still very much a novelty, and like almost all other Talks programmes of the time, this would have been carefully pre-scripted, here by Michael Spender (who may be the explorer and brother of poet Stephen and artist Humphrey).
Serge Chermayeff was a Russian-born British architect and designer, and very much a modernist, having already created with Erich Mendelson the splendid De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. He had also just completed the building of his own starkly beautiful house, Bentley Wood, in East Sussex, the grounds of which were adorned with Henry Moore’s Recumbent Figure 1938, now with Tate.
Enhancing the culturally progressive panel, Maxwell Fry was another modernist, much influenced by the ideas of Le Corbusier and, briefly, the professional partner of Walter Gropius during his time in England in th mid-1930s. Together they had designed the influential Impington Village College. As Wikipedia tells us,
From 1937 to 1942, Fry worked as secretary, with Arthur Korn as chairman, on the governing committee of the MARS group plan for the redevelopment of postwar London, the results of which were outlined in his 1944 work Fine Building. The plan was described by Dennis Sharp, one of Fry’s collaborators, as “frankly Utopian and Socialistic in concept”.
Duncan Miller is presumably John Duncan Miller, an architect and interior designer, while John Gloag was a fantasy and speculative fiction writer who also authored books on furniture design. As for Merlin Minshall, this is presumably the naval officer and adventurer who is held to have been one of the models that Ian Fleming had in mind when he conceived James Bond.
I have little doubt that their discussion, cocooned in a clubby all-male atmosphere and perhaps fuelled (moderately) by the whisky decanter, would have been fascinating, but I have yet to find a script, and of course the live transmission has gone the way of all studio production from the pre-war years.
In the header image, the figures are (I think) from left to right, Duncan Miller, A.G. Street, Merlin Minshall, Serge Chermayeff and Maxwell Fry; the image just above features, again from left to right, John Gloag, Duncan Miller and A.G. Street.
[OTD post no. 282; 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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