OTD in early British television: 17 February 1938
John Wyver writes: ‘We certainly live in a marvellous age,’ Amanda reflects to Elyot in the second act of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. ‘Too marvellous,’ replies Elyot, noting, somewhat ambivalently, that among the marvels of the age are bovine gland injections, and ‘aeroplanes, and Cosmic Atoms, and Television.’
The afternoon of Tuesday 17 February 1938 saw the second performance via the marvel of the age that was television of Coward’s one-act comedy from the cycle Tonight at 8.30, Hands Across the Sea. This was one of five pre-war screen stagings of his work, Which means that Coward was the modern playwright who, after Bernard Shaw, achieved the second-highest number of pre-war productions on BBC Television.
The first was his comic ‘interlude’ Red Peppers in November 1937. Then Hands Across the Sea before the full-length plays of Hay Fever, on the evening of Christmas Day 1938; The Young Idea in February 1939; and then in August that year, days before the service shut down because of the war, Private Lives.
The files at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre contain traces of how reluctant or disinterested Noel Coward himself was about appearing on or even showing interest in television, and at one point he rejected an invitation from Director of Television Gerald Cock to come to the studio at Alexandra Palace to see the new medium in operation.
Coward did, however, make just one pre-war television appearance, on the afternoon of Tuesday 6 June 1939, when the BBC’s outside broadcast cameras were at the Ranelagh Club to see him open the annual Theatrical Garden Party, given in aid of the Actor’s Orphanage. On this occasion he seems also to have been interviewed, along with Clemence Dane, Ivor Novello and other luminaries, as well as Mrs Smithers, noted in the records as ‘a member of the public’.
As for the productions, the WAC files contain nothing from either Coward or his PA/secretary Lorn Loraine enquiring about, for example, casting, proposed cuts to the scripts, or the approach of the productions, or any follow-ups about how the show went over.
The only exchanges, or at least the only ones that appear to have survived (and the paper archiving at the time was rigorous), relate to fees for the performance. Bernard Shaw, by contrast, was far more engaged and interventionist about television’s productions of his plays.
The BBC had to agree to pay ten guineas per performance for Red Peppers and also for Hands Across the Sea which,as the copyright department pointed out was “very much higher than our usual rate of payment for one-act plays”.
Billed in Radio Times as ‘from the author’s original production’, Hands Across the Sea like Red Peppers was produced by Reginald Smith. I’m curious if anyone here can add to the little I’ve found out about Smith, as it was clearly his interest that led to Coward’s plays being produced for television.
Born in 1895, Reginald Smith was acting in the Oxford Playhouse Company in the early 1920s. One of the fellow members was Val Gielgud, who a decade later was the BBC’s Head of Drama – and to give a sense of how tight-knit the overlapping worlds of theatre and television were in these years, Smith also acted with George More O’Ferrall, by 1937 established as the most accomplished of television drama producers.
In the early 1930s, Reginald Smith was acting in revues mounted by André Charlot and he seems to have worked as an assistant producer to Charlot, and it’s likely that it is here that he met Noel Coward, who as we know contributed songs and sketches to Charlot’s shows.
In the summer of 1937 he was employed as a television floor manager at Alexandra Palace and was quickly promoted to be Head of Television Variety. A mention in Television and Short-wave World in October 1937 recorded that “Reggie is a big, jolly fellow, every inch an actor. He has, I believe, played everything except principal boy in pantomime.”
Most of what he produced (and at this time that also means directed) for television were cabaret broadcasts, but he also brought a small number of dramas to the screen, most notably the plays of Noel Coward. After the war he seems to have worked quite extensively in Glasgow. He died in 1962.
Adapting Coward’s original stage production, for Hands Across the Sea Smith brought together a cast including Nadine Marsh and Nicholas Phipps as the central couple of the Gilpins, played in Coward’s original 1935 production by Gertrude Lawrence and himself. The comedy derives from their haphazard and chaotic reception of guests in their drawing room, which can be seen in the two production shots reproduced here. Eveley Gregg, Alan Webb and Edward Underdown reprised their original roles. .
And as for the play itself, Wikipedia has this:
The main characters, a British couple, Commander Peter Gilpin and his wife Lady Maureen (“Piggie”) Gilpin, were widely recognised as caricatures of Coward’s friends Lord Louis (“Dickie”) Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, who, Coward later said, “used to give cocktail parties and people used to arrive that nobody had ever heard of and sit about and go away again; somebody Dickie had met somewhere, or somebody Edwina had met – and nobody knew who they were. We all talked among ourselves, and it was really a very very good basis for a light comedy.” Mountbatten, in mock indignation, called it “a bare-faced parody of our lives, with Gertie Lawrence playing Lady Maureen Gilpin and Noël Coward playing me. Absolutely outrageous…”
Frustratingly, I can find no reviews of the television production.
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