OTD in early British television: 9 July 1939
John Wyver writes: Responding to the full-length drama given on the evening of Sunday 9 July 1939, Grace Wyndham Goldie in her column for The Listener did not hide her judgement from her readers:
There were half-a-dozen curious things about the new play, The Fame of Grace Darling, which was given its first performance last week. Infinitely the most curious was the fact that it was performed at all. For it was as handsomely bad as any piece I remember.
The writing was banal; the characters stereotyped; the plot non-existent; the whole thing an essay in an outmoded sentimentality which came near to burlesquing itself.
This despite Grace Darling being played by Wendy Hiller despite the use of a cast of 24 in an elaborate production using three sets with four cameras and a lighting rig of twenty-four main lamps, and despite the transmission being overseen by the invariably reliable, if occasionally eccentric, Fred O’Donovan.
Per Wikipedia, Grace Horsley Darling
was an English lighthouse keeper’s daughter. Her participation in the rescue of survivors from the shipwrecked Forfarshire in 1838 brought her national fame. The paddlesteamer ran aground on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland in northeast England; eight members of the crew and one passenger, Sarah Dawson, were saved.
For Wyndham Goldie, Darling was a perfectly acceptable subject for a drama:
She had heroic qualities; her heroism brought her money and medals and the attention of an astonished and admiring England; these things estranged her from her father; they separated her from her lover. And then fate threw in an early death from consumption.
It is too much. And the consumption which was fatal to Grace Darling was, alas, equally fatal to our authoress. I do not suggest that the play would have been tolerable even without it. For there was not a single word or a single action given to the main character which revealed an exceptional quality. But the consumption was the final blow. That Grace Darling took cold, developed consumption and died is not in itself dramatic.
The authoress of The Fame of Grace Darling [actress Yvette Piene] seems happily unaware of any difficulty and cheerfully allowed a tidal wave of sentimental death to sweep right over her play and drown both it and us. And the unhappy cast, headed by Miss Wendy Hiller as Grace Darling, apparently decided that the only way to deal with it was to pump the sentiment for all it was worth and so treated us to a fine exhibition of quavers and tears.
Intriguingly, Wyndham Goldie also used her review to comment on the studio style that O’Donovan brought to the presentation:
The camera work was as curious as the play. But much more important. For a bad play dies with the week whereas bad camera tricks can ruin a dozen productions. And some of the camera work we are getting from Alexandra Palace just now is very tricky indeed.
Here is one example from Grace Darling. We are shown the hero and heroine who are in a room and walking towards a window. The next moment another camera shows us their faces from outside that same window. The effect was startling. It was as if we had been spirited out of doors and were now obliged to flutter in mid-air in order to watch the action of the play.
There was a similar trick in the death-bed scene when we had a shot of a room from the wall side of a box-bed. This kind of thing seems to me to be impermissible.
Of course at this distance and with no recording it is hard to determine exactly the nature of of the critic’s concerns, but one interpretation is that the kind of shots that would have been perfectly acceptable in a film felt not only inappropriate but ‘impermissable’ in a transmission that she expected to follow the spatial logic of theatre.
Image: The Wreck of the Forfarshire by Thomas Musgrave Joy, 1840, Dundee Art Galleries and Museums; Grace Darling is in the rowing boat to the right.
[OTD post no. 204; 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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