John Wyver writes: 28 March appears to be another unremarkable date in each year of pre-war television, and as a consequence it offers the opportunity to compile another subject index to my 113 original posts to date. The format is similar to my earlier one highlighting posts about early television drama, listing the posts in chronological order of subject, except that the focus of this one is dance from ballet to ballroom.
As before, these daily blog posts are intended to run until the publication at the start of 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain. For fuller indexes of previous posts go here for February posts, here for January ones, and here for ones in December (and the end of November).
John Wyver writes: On Monday 27 March 1939 television visited His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, for a three-hour relay, produced by Dallas Bower, of Magyar Melody, a romance set in Hungary with book and music co-written by the BBC’s former director of variety, Eric Maschwitz. This was the third live broadcast of a full-length West End show, following When We Are Married and Twelfth Night.
Writing evocatively in The Listener, Grace Wyndham Goldie was clear that she approved, albeit with a qualification or two:
Well, you can do it. You can sit at home in your own armchair in Kent or Sussex with the owls hooting in the elms outside your window and watch the performance of London stars in a London musical comedy in a London theatre. Here, in fact, is the moment for which we have all been waiting. It arrived last week with the success of Magyar Melody.
John Wyver writes: The Sunday evening play on 26 March 1939 was a production by Desmond Davis of Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century comedy She Stoops to Conquer. Morris Harvey and Renée le Vaux played Mr and Mrs Hardcastle, with James Hayter as Toby Lumpkin and Eric Portman as Young Marlow.
Three weeks later, with almost the same cast, Davis put on a modern adaptation of the play, re-written in the language of the 1930s by Giles Playfair, under the title A Night at the Hardcastles. Now a drama in modern dress with motor-cars, cocktails and cigarettes, this was based on a film treatment by Playfair’s father, the late Sir Nigel Playfair.
Elizabeth Schooling danced the role of ‘La Fille au Bar’, and others in the cast Celia Franks, Prudence Hyman and Walter Gore. William Chappell created the costumes and setting, which had been made for the tiny stage of the Mercury Theatre and imported into the studio, and which as can be seen from a production photograph aimed to replicate the details of Édouard Manet‘s great and enigmatic 1882 painting Un bar aux Folies Bergère.
John Wyver writes: Almost all pre-war television comedy came courtesy of funny men in variety bills, or in dramas taken over from the theatre. But there is one pre-war original series that points the way to the future of television humour.
In the Barber’s Chair, ‘a sketch by Reginald Arkell’, was given an 11-minute slot in early March 1939, with a second episode that had its second outing on the afternoon of Friday 24 March. Born in 1881, Arkell was a comic novelist who also wrote many musical plays for the London theatre, including an adaptation of the spoof history book 1066 and All That: 1066—and all that: A Musical Comedy based on that Memorable History by Sellar and Yeatman.
John Wyver writes: On Thursday 23rd March 1939 the 227th edition of the magazine series Picture Page was transmitted in the afternoon and, following the usual pattern, the 228th was shown that evening. In the afternoon, the show ran for just under 25 minutes; with an entirely different selection of guests in the evening it played for 36 minutes.
Joan Mitchell at the switchboard was the link between short interviews by Leslie Mitchell with a series of guests, a number of whom had brought props. There was no set, just a plain background, although sometimes guests sat at a table or, more often, walked around with the camera operator trying hard to keep them in focus.
The series was the single acknowledged ‘hit’ of pre-war transmissions from Alexandra Palace, in part because of the eclectic line-ups, which is what I want simply to celebrate today.
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Tuesday 22 March 1938 was graced with the first performance of Dallas Bower’s 75-minute production of Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello. As Wikipedia says, the drama is ‘a study on madness with comic and tragic elements… about a man who believes himself to be Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.’ Ernest Milton played the ‘king’, with Valerie Hobson taking the role of Frida, his daughter.
Pirandello was the European playwright most frequently performed pre-war at AP. In addition to a new presentation of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (which Lance Sieveking had staged for the 30-line serviced in 1930, three more Pirandello plays were given, including The Jar and Fruits of Remembrance, as well as Henry IV in this typically ambitious production by Bower.
John Wyver writes: Starting at 2.55pm on Tuesday 21 March 1939, the television service carried a 16-minute outside broadcast from Victoria Station where the King and Queen greeted His Excellency the President of the French Republic and Madame Lebrun.
Michael Standing and John Snagge were the commentators during a broadcast which included shots of the crowds gathered outside the station; the scene of greeting on the platform with, among others, the Dukes and Duchesses of Gloucester and Kent, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Lascelles; shots of the arrival of the state coaches and the departure of the procession. For the acute critic Grace Wyndham Goldie, this was an occasion of signal significance.
John Wyver writes: On the afternoon of Saturday 20 March 1937, following a display of model aircraft, producer Dallas Bower oversaw the first transmission of the 35-minute Pasquinade, claimed as the first original revue for the new medium. Conceived in his ‘incorrigibly highbrow’ manner (the description is director of television Gerald Cock’s), Bower brought together the talents of, among others, dancer Maude Lloyd, writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, and actors Hermione Baddeley and Valerie Hobson (above, photographed by ‘Sasha’ in 1937).
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Friday 19 March 1937 saw the Television’s first Grand National, although not with live pictures from Aintree. Instead, as was the case with other sports events during the pre-war years, and especially before the mobile control room entered use in May 1937, ‘viewers’ had to make do with radio commentary, which was carried on the television channel, accompanied by generic photographs of the course.
Radio Times provided the ‘air-photo’ below to help listeners follow the commentary, and this is the kind of thing that AP would have put in screen during the race (although we don’t know if this one was used). Comparable ‘coverage’, and still no live pictures, was provided by AP in 1938 and 1939.
