OTD in early British television: 23 January 1939
John Wyver writes: First transmitted on the afternoon of Monday 23 January 1939, Rehearsal for a Drama is one of around a dozen plays that premiered on the Television service from Alexandra Palace. Written for the new medium, and set in a television studio at, well, Alexandra Palace, on the evidence of the script it was also a remarkable “meta” moment for early television. Oh, and there’s a mystery attached to it too.
Early in 1939, ‘E.H.R.’ reported for The Observer that, ‘Plays especially written for television are increasing in number,’ noting that one of these, Rehearsal for a Drama, ‘exploited the whole mechanism of a television studio faithfully and with remarkable effect.’ And the play, credited to Roy Carter and Emanuel Wax and produced by Moultrie Kelsall, is indeed — to judge from the surviving script, preserved on microfiche in the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham — a remarkable ‘meta-televisual’ thriller.
Following a blank screen and a fragment that cuts off abruptly of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (an opera about a murder set against a commedia dell’arte performance), a ‘Vision On’ sign appears, followed by ’Sound On’. A scene of a man and woman at a piano follows, seemingly from a conventional drawing-room drama, building to a the arrival of a jealous lover and a shooting.
Which just after ‘a shot rings out’ is revealed to be a studio run-through for a television play. Studio cameras and crew are now integrated into the action, which switches between the ‘play’ on screen and views of the production’s cameras.
After a re-set, play the scene is played again, but this time one of the actors is, within the world of the play, actually shot. So it goes, with an inspector called, a police investigation played against the scene from the play being run once again.
In the process complex cast jealousies and resentments are revealed before the murderer, exposed and having admitted his guilt, fatally electrocutes himself on a high tension cable. Preceding the spoken closing credits, the fragment of Pagliacci is heard again, ‘Vision On’ is switched off, and on the last note of the music, so too is ’Sound On’.
‘Besides giving us an insight into television methods,’ ‘E.H.R.’ reported about Rehearsal for a Drama, ‘it is a good play and I hope it will be repeated very soon.’
One additional thought, prompted by the immensely pleasing success of my appeal on Sunday about the mysteries associated with The Underground Murder Mystery, which resulted in a clutch of great responses that extended our knowledge about that play. In Radio Times, ‘The Scanner’ noted of authors Emanuel Wax and Roy Carter:
The former has translated several English plays for broadcasts on the Continent; the latter is the pseudonym of a film director and scenario writer. Among other Continental concerns Carter used to work for Ufa in Germany. He has written scripts for world-famous stars such as Anna Sten, Anton Walbrook, Peter Lorre, Oscar Homolka, and Dorothea Wieck.
So who was the director and script writer hiding behind the name of ‘Roy Carter’ – and why might he have been doing so? Surely not because, when compared to working in film, making television at this point was just a bit infra dig?
UPDATE
Mystery solved! With thanks to Adam B., Paul Hayes and Paul Rhodes on Bluesky: Roy Carter was the pseudonym for Rudolph Cartier, later a hugely influential television producer with the BBC. More details to come later, together with a reference to an article by Tobias Hochscherf, and the Wikipedia page, where this information was hiding in plain sight.
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