OTD in early British television: 14 February 1938
John Wyver writes: A late-night treat (which in those days meant scheduling at 10pm) on Monday 14 February 1938 was the 13-minute Bridge Demonstration hosted by Hubert Phillips (above). Members of the Welsh (male) team that had taken on England in the Bridge International at Cardiff the previous day, played out a hand or two as Phillips offered a commentary and tips.
The transmission was one of a number of such Bridge games for AP’s upscale suburban audience, which in the pre-war years was also offered lessons in ballroom dancing and in tennis, golf and show-jumping.
Hubert Phillips was the founder and editor of the British Bridge World, and a pioneer of bridge organisation in England. He was the first chair of the English Bridge Union in 1936, and was a key person in setting up the first Anglo-American match.
Drawing on contemporary accounts, Wikipedia fills in some of the details about his first attemptsw to bring bridge to television:
These were programs which involved discussion of pre-selected hands, displayed on boards, followed by their bidding and play by expert pairs. Some of the hands were taken from famous matches, others were devised by Phillips.
Phillips was also a successful journalist and author of numberous books about puzzles and games. In a June 1937 television talk for AP, billed as Wizardry with Words, he suggested how ‘words can form the basis of a successful party’, with examples of anagrams, palindromes and the like. This was the start of the talks department offering ways to enhance the sociability of suburbia.
Starting in May 1938, AP invited the viewer to participate vicariously in a sequence of parlour games that it elected to call ‘bees’. A word that had originated in the United States, a ‘bee’ was a gathering for a special purpose, such as quilting or barn raising.
Bees focussed on the competitive spelling of words became immensely popular, and it was in this imported form that a team of television artists first took on four ‘regular viewers’, who happened to have the well-known film critic C.A. Lejeune amongst their number.
Later in the year there were definition and general knowledge bees, and at Christmas Tactile Bee, which involved guessing by touch a number of familiar objects (chosen by Phillips), and which tempted Julian Huxley and John Betjeman to the studio. Phillips was also the compère for the slightly bizarre Bee for Budget in April 1939.
Knowledge as a light-hearted and lightly participatory parlour game was clearly a rich seam for the new service, and the bees reinforced the ordered and stable domesticity conjured up also by talks on cooking and guidance on dancing the valeta. The world could come to the home in ways that were comfortable, unthreatening, and imbued with the assumption that mastery was eminently achievable.
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