OTD in early British television: 3 July 1938
John Wyver writes: Stage representations of the Great War were rare in the first decade after the Armistice, and it was R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, which became a major hit after its premiere in late December 1928, that defined the theatrical representation of the western front. The play offered an unsentimental, tragic sense of the conflict, and in November 1937 this was the Television service’s first substantial dramatic presentation of the war.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the ways in which loss and grief marked the interwar period so deeply, there were then another ten or so AP dramas that engaged directly with the conflict and its legacies. These war plays included Ernst Johannsen’s Brigade Exchange, set in a German telephone dugout on the western front, which was first produced for radio in Munich in 1929.
Per Wikipedia, translated from the German original:
In 1938, [Johannssen’s] Jewish partner and their son were forced to emigrate to England. In 1939, Johannsen followed him, married her, and remained in London until 1957. His initial collaboration with the BBC ended in 1941 due to personal and artistic differences… In 1957, he returned to Hamburg with his wife and two of his three children… However, Johannsen’s literary career was no longer successful and he died lonely and bitter in 1977.
In Britain in 1930 an English version of Brigade Exchange was prepared for BBC radio by Dulcima Glasby and Isa Donald Benzie, and it was this script, billed as ‘a Sound Picture’, that George More O’Ferrall produced at AP on 3 July 1938.
The cast included Reginald Tate, who played Captain Stanhope in Television’s Journey’s End nine months before, and Mark Dignam, and clips from G.W. Pabst’s 1930 German feature film Westfront 1918 were used for context.
Of the production, Grace Wyndham Goldie wrote,
Good camera handling can suggest space where there is none and give the viewer an impression of ease and polish… In Mr O’Ferrall’s production the picture was always well composed and the edges clean; the camera singled out the important characters and kept an excellent balance between “close ups” and long shots…
[B]ecause we could see everything we wanted to see, it was possible to forget the screen altogether. And when television plays make us forget the screen they are doing great things.
[OTD post no. 198; 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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