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: the afternoon of Tuesday 4 January 1938 saw the first outside broadcast visit to Bertram Mills's Circus at Olympia (above), from where broadcasts would be shown across the next five days. This first transmission featured the opening more
John Wyver writes: the evening of Tuesday 3 January 1939 saw a studio repeat presentation of Denis Johnston's contemporary comedy The Moon in the Yellow River, produced for the cameras by the author himself. The satire had been first 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
John Wyver writes: New Year's Eve 1938 saw one of BBC Television's two outside broadcast units parked round the corner from Grosvenor House on London's Park Lane. For 35 minutes from 11.30pm, from the swanky ballroom there Leslie Mitchell hosted more
John Wyver writes: The conventional forms of conventional politics on television are absent from the pre-war Alexandra Palace service. There was no television news, and Panorama, the first regular current affairs magazine show would not debut until 1953. But there more
John Wyver writes: 'Are you wondering whether to get a television set or not?,' critic Grace Wyndham Goldie (above, c. 1937) asked in her Listener review-of-the-year column dated Thursday 29 December 1938. 'Then let me assure you,' she continued, 'that more