John Wyver writes: the afternoon of Saturday 14 January at 3.30pm saw the second presentation of what was now, given the timing of the the transmission, somewhat incongruously named Schubert Night. I previously noted the first broadcast on 9 more
John Wyver writes: on Thursday 13 January 1938 the schedule carried an outside broadcast from the Chiswick headquarters of the London Transport Passenger Board. The focus was the training of a London bus driver, created as what in the language more
John Wyver writes: Tuesday 12 January 1937 saw the first broadcast from Alexandra Palace of a series titled The World of Women. Conceived by producer Cecil Lewis, who was soon to depart for Hollywood, the fortnightly strand of broadcasts on more
John Wyver writes: after Alexander Calder yesterday, we can continue the theme of early television's engagements with modernism by focussing on New Architecture, a 17-minute talk on Tuesday 11 January 1938 given by John Summerson and prompted by the more
John Wyver writes: tucked into the evening schedule on Monday 10 January 1938 was a ten-minute broadcast titled Alexander Calder's Mobiles, and there's a case to be made for this as the first television programme conceived as visual art; not, more
John Wyver writes: on the afternoon of Friday 8 January 1937 Dallas Bower produced Burnt Sepia, a half-hour variety line-up billed as, in the racially derogatory language of the day, ‘an all-coloured cabaret’. This was television’s first variety programme featuring more
John Wyver writes: on Friday 7 January 1938, when Alexandra Palace broadcast a circus OB, a Pepler masque from Aesop's Fables, a fashion show, and Archie Harradine revue and a dramatisation of W.W. Jacobs's horror story 'The Monkey's Paw', more
John Wyver writes: One of the things I love about researching early television is how bare programme listings can lead down the strangest and most unlikely rabbit holes. Take the line-ups for the two Picture Page editions on Tuesday 5 more
John Wyver writes: a heavy between times cold prevented a posting last Sunday, and travel to Italy (more on that to come) may interfere with one for next (although I'm aiming still to keep up the early television OTDs), so more
John Wyver writes: In keeping with the aspirational tenor of Alexandra Palace's lifestyle programming for its professional middle-class viewers, each winter there was at least one studio broadcast for those looking forward to, or dreaming about, a ski-ing holiday across more