OTD in early British television: 4 August 1938
John Wyver writes: On the evening of Thursday 4 August 1938 Alexandra Palace offered a feature programme with the somewhat unweildy title Exhibition: A Panorama Paris 1797-Glasgow 1938. Devised by Reginald Beckwith and Andrew Cruikshank, and produced by Moultrie Kelsall, this marked Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition with a look back to notable international fairs of the past century and a half.
The format was a sequence of short historical dramatisations linked to Paris in 1797-8, the 1851 Great Exhibition and the White City site, which hosted five international fairs in the early twentiety century, interspersed with ‘schoolroom’ scenes, which presumably provided some kind of historical context.
The three key creatives had collaborated on an earlier feature programme, Stands Scotland..?, in November 1937, and ‘E.H.R.’ in the Observer felt that they
had by no means expended all their originality on Stands Scotland…? Those who saw both will agree that the authors are a clever pair, with a gift for seeing things from the hitherto unused point of view.
In The Listener Grace Wyndham Goldie agreed:
Last week’s Exhibition, the first feature programme I have seen on television… was astonishingly successful, partly because it was, in form, a chronicle, partly because of its changes of scene and partly because the camera was used to comment, often wittily, upon the words instead of merely photographing the speaker. Since the programme had the vitality that so many of the plays lack it did not matter so much that it was long.
With this pair of feature programmes, with the broadcasts that Denis Johnston was developing like Death at Newtownstewart and The Parnell Commission, and with Soho and East End, the studio documentary was gradually emerging in these final months before the war. This was a form that was to flourish, comparatively briefly, in the post-war years, before being effectively supplanted by the tradition of documentary filmmaking.
[OTD post no. 230; 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.]
Leave a Reply