OTD in early British television: 8 September 1937
John Wyver writes: Today and tomorrow I want to highlight two early columns about television by the doyenne of pre-war critics, Grace Wyndham Goldie. And I want to do so by showcasing them in, as it were, reverse order, with the later one, from 8 September 1937 today, and more or less her first words about television, from 9 September 1936, tomorrow.
Tomorrow’s is concerned with first thoughts about the medium itself, whereas this one focuses on a particular production. Before this Wyndham Goldie was steeped in the theatre, having worked with the Liverpool Playhouse and written a book about its history, and in radio drama, writing for several years about the artform that debuted just before television.
The production that prompted this column was George More O’Ferrall’s studio presentation of Thornton Wilder’s one-act Love and How to Cure It , which the family’s website describes as a
melodramatic comedy set in SoHo, London, on the stage of the Tivoli Palace of Music in April of 1895. A young man is hopelessly in love with a teenage music-hall dancer who can’t stand him, thinks he is stalking her (which he is), and fears that he is going to shoot her (which he isn’t). Because she rejects him, he decides to kill himself… This is one of Wilder’s many treatments of unrequited love.
The cast that O’Ferrall brought together on the afternoon of Wednesday 8 September 1937 was (above) Wendy Toye, Athene Seyler and Edward Chapman, who had also played the drama in Tyrone Guthrie’s Globe Theatre production of the play. O’Ferrall had presented this for television from Alexandra Palace five months earlier in the Theatre Parade strand. This time round, Guthrie’s name was noticeably absent from the billing. Wyndham Goldie was entranced:
Would we all be viewers if we could? In other words, if we sell the radio, the cat, the dog and the piano to buy a television set what fun will we get out of it after we are tired of playing with the knobs? Well, it is not my business to talk about outside broadcasts – Wimbledon and the like – which obviously give viewers something the others cannot get.
And I had my say some months back about variety when I made it clear that to my mind television variety at its best can beat everything but the real thing. But what – and now we are coming to it – what about televised drama?
A year ago when I saw the first television show done for Radiolympia I was enormously impressed by the possibilities of this new medium [this is tomorrow’s post]. Here was a combination of intimacy (the actor seen near to and talking directly to me in my sitting-room) with reality (the action actually taking place at this very moment and not merely reproduced later on) which was like nothing else in the world.
The theatre gives much greater reality, but intimacy only to the people sitting in the stalls; the cinema gives a certain amount of intimacy, but no reality al all. And I still believe that the particular combination of these qualities which television offers is immensely important, and that one day we shall get new playwrights writing new kinds of plays to exploit its possibilities.
But meanwhile what kind of television drama are we going to get? Obviously certain types of stage plays cut and adapted for the microphone. And I must own that untjl last week I was very much disappointed with the quality of the entertainment these things offered.
Whereas the best variety, the best talks and the best topical shows (Mr. Madden’s Picture Page, for instance) could be accepted wholeheartedly as satisfactory, the plays I happened to see were marvellous, astounding, miracles, but always ‘considering’; in this case considering the impromptu, improvised, charade-like conditions under which they had, for the most part, to be produced.
But last week was for me epoch-making. On Wednesday I watched Mr. Thornton Wilder’s one-act play Love and How to Cure It in the viewing room at Alexandra Palace. Now l admit that watching at Alexandra Palace is a very different matter from viewing in one’s own home.
The screen there does not have hysterics as it occasionally does in private houses from a mixture of ‘interference’ and inexpert handling. And there is, too, an atmosphere of tension and excitement – very like that of a first night in a theatre – which undoubtedly works on the nerves and heightens appreciation.
But even allowing for favourable conditions Love and How to Cure It was still an immense advance on previous plays l have seen. For the first time I found it possible to become absorbed in the story and forget the difficulties of the medium. The picture certainly was not perfect; its edges had a hazy, out-of-focus look and the individual shots had not the posed certainty which made parts of Hassan and Murder in the Cathedral pictorially satisfying.
But I would rather have two pennorth of drama than a whole bagful of animated pictures. And for immediate entertainment plays with one set and a small cast like this, and produced, as this one was, to emphasize character and story are certainly the thing.
Was what we got altogether Mr. Wilder’s play? Not quite. The small screen could not give us the romantic quality of the half-lit stage with the little ballet dancer pirouetting in and out of the limelight and her ninetyish young lover standing in the shadows with his cloak and his revolver.
But it did give us the play’s comedy in close ups of two remarkable performances by Miss Athene Seyler and Mr. Edward Chapman as the soubrette and the clown. Mr. Chapman’s performance was perhaps a shade the more remarkable because it had ‘television quality’. And if that is a new one to you it is going to be a very important new one for actors.
[OTD post no. 265; 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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