OTD in early British television: 31 March 1938
John Wyver writes: At 9.06pm on Thursday 31 March 1938, AP presented The Hogarth Puppet Grostesques, produced and manipulated (along with Ann Hogarth and Kitty Tyzack) by Jan Bussell (above). On the programme were performances of ‘The Puppet Orchestra’, ‘The Green Man’, ‘The Indian Rope Trick’ and ‘The Dream Dancer’, given to recordings of music by Grieg and Tchaikovsky.
Founded in 1932 by Bussell and Hogarth, The Hogarth Puppets, according to the online World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts, ‘became Britain’s best-known company at home and abroad’.
Ann Hogarth was trained as a stage manager at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Jan Bussell was an actor and television producer already involved in puppetry when the two met and, looking for new initiatives in puppet theatre, worked together as full-time puppeteers. Their repertoire, for adults and children, mixed different techniques of puppetry in an adventurous range of pieces: literary dramas, children’s tales, poetry and songs, music hall and circus turns.
Puppetry was a favourite genre for pre-war television. Indeed exactly a year earlier, on Wednesday 31 March 1937, Scott Gordon’s Marionettes presented a variety show from AP. The London Marionettes had made multiple appearances on the 30-line service, and John Carr’s Jacquard Puppets, with Carr’s beautifully carved small-scale stringed marionettes, and Victor Hotchkiss’s London Marionette Theatre also appeared from AP.
Once he had joined AP as a producer, Jan Bussell’s proselytising for puppetry secured frequent television slots for himself and Ann, including for ambitious productions like a presentation of Manuel de Falla’s 1923 one-act opera Master Peter’s Puppet Show, mounted by Dallas Bower.
Bussell also ensured exposure for, and handled the studio presentation on most occasions of, a host of other British puppeteers, including The Wessex Puppets (giving ‘a scene from Henry V’), The Ebor Marionettes (with a scene from Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife), and, again, Carr’s Jacquard Puppets, who appeared in selections of musical numbers and playlets more than a dozen times.
In many ways, songs, dances and sketches performed by puppets were precisely aligned to the challenges of the small screen — camera coverage was simple for small figures in a defined frame with negligible depth-of-field; rehearsal requirements were minimal, and set-ups and de-rigs were fast since the marionettes travelled with their own foldaway theatre; and importantly, they were artists beyond the constraining hand of variety managers and agents like George Black.
Hence the frequency of their appearances, and hence, too, perhaps, the sympathy one feels on reading Wyndham Goldie remarking, in July 1939 and a propos of nothing, ’N.B. I don’t wish to be difficult but we have had rather a lot of puppets lately.’
But then, after the war, from 1946, Ann Hogarth was pulling the strings for Muffin the Mule:
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