OTD in early British television: 13 December 1937
John Wyver writes: Presented on the afternoon of Monday 13 December 1937 was the most ambitious television ballet to date, act 2 of, as it was billed, Le lac des cygnes, or Swan Lake to the rest of us. The troupe was the Vic-Wells Ballet Company, from which chrysalis the Royal Ballet would emerge post-war, and this was their production that had premiered in November 1934. Studio manager and now producer D.H. Munro was at the control desk.
With music by Tchaikovsky, played here by the 22-strong BBC Television Orchestra, augmented by an additional seven musicians, this had Marius Petipa’s classic choreography revived by Nicholas Sergeyev, who had brought records of the production when he fled from Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution.
The cast that day was to have been headed by the Vic-Wells’ new star, Margot Fonteyn, but we learn from Andrew Martin’s invaluable Sound & Vision compilation of the PasBs that as Odette Pearl Argyle went on in her place. Robert Helpmann danced Siegfried and William Chappell, Benno.
One notable aspect was the incorporation of shots of actual swans, filmed by Major Barbrook on the nearby lake in Alexandra Park. Another was in-house designer Peter Bax’s studio setting, which was credited as ‘décor’ as the context for the costumes by Hugh Stevenson, who had designed the scenery on stage. As ‘The Scanner’ noted in Radio Times (10 December 1937), the locale is detailed as ‘a lake in a mountainous part of the country’:
On the stage this setting offers a grand opportunity for ‘ atmosphere ‘, a mood of extreme beauty oppressed by sinister gloom and a fate that will not be denied. It is not so easy, this atmosphere business, in the television studio… Despite all this, Peter Bax, for the first time in television, has designed a setting with the express intention of conveying a mood instead of merely a background.
‘The Scanner’ also paid tribute to the company’s founder Lilian Baylis, who had died just over a month before:
It seems odd to see the name of Lilian Baylis absent from the billing of a Vic-Wells ballet programme. She will always be remembered at Alexandra Palace for her enthusiasm for television, and for her participation in a little scene in the artists’ waiting-room just before she went into the studio to be televised in ‘ Picture Page ‘. Fussing round her like three affectionate daughters were [dancer] Pearl Argyle, [actor] Marie Ney, and [singer] Joan Cross, one adjusting a brooch for her, another arranging a fur, and another patting her hair into position.
A photograph of herself in front of the television camera was sent on to her after the show. In a letter to D. H. Munro she wrote: ‘ I only hope that if I did look like that, the television camera lied to the public at large.’ Alexandra Palace always found Lilian Baylis, for all her reputation of being ‘ difficult’, a charming person to work with.
Header image: a public domain engraving of the design by F. Gaanen for the décor of act 2 of Swan Lake the the 1877 Moscow production.
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