OTD in early British television: 4 July 1933
John Wyver writes: The late-night 30-line broadcast on Tuesday 4 July 1933 featured alongside comedian Sydney Arnold and Olive Groves with songs from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the Russo-Finnish dancer Cleo Nordi. Trained in St Petersburg, she had been a celebrated soloist with Anna Pavlova’s company between 1926 and 1931.
That night in July, in one of her many appearances on the 30-line service, she gave a rumba to a tune by Lewis Gensler, a ‘gypsy dance’ to a Riccardo Drigo composition, and a Glazunov ‘Bacchanale’. Accompanying her were a trio of piano (the ever-reliable Cyril Smith), harpsichord and drums.
As Janet Rowson Davis has observed about dancers on the 30-line service, ‘few dancers appeared more than three times’, the exceptions being Lydia Sokolova and Nordi. In all, she gave more than a dozen performances, often using music arranged by her husband, Walford Hyden, who had been Pavola’s music director and who a composer and conductor.
In November 1934, the monthly Television observed,
Cleo Nordi helps so much with the arrangement of dances in the studio that she is qualifying for the job of choreographer to the BBC.
After the war she choreographed for musical theatre and a small number of films, but she was really esteemed as a ballet teacher, including among her pupils the radical German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. She died aged 85 in 1983.
Image via SVT arkiv.
[OTD post no. 199; 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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