OTD in early British television: 13 February 1939
John Wyver writes: On the morning of Monday 13 February 1939 Alexandra Palace offered a 6-minute glimpse of studio rehearsals for George More O’Ferrall’s presentation, to be shown that afternoon, of the comic drama The Royal Family of Broadway (above). The producer introduced on screen several of the cast of Edna Ferber and George Kaufman‘s play, including Dame May Whitty and Basil Radford.
This exceptional transmission was organised to play into an elaborate and extensive display of television receivers, which also included a small on-site studio, that opened that morning at Selfridge’s (and to which we will return in a future post). But my interest here is rather the thoughtful Listener column by Grace Wyndham Goldie that was prompted by what she called More O’Ferrall’s ‘successfully brisk production’.
Some 18 months on from her first writing about the medium, Wyndham Goldie used this filing to look back at the rapid development of television drama and to reflect on its current health. As she wrote,
When experiments first started at Alexandra Palace neither stage nor screen provided producers and casts with safe precedents. Words and actions on the stage have to be overemphasised if they arc to seem lifelike when they reach the audience. The cinema screen, because of the roving capabilities of the camera, needs under-emphasis.
Television shares some of the problems of both the older arts, and has others of its own. They are being tackled with courage and imagination, and all regular viewers will, I think, agree with me that the results absolutely justify all the trouble that is being taken.
Television plays were, not so long ago, interesting only as pioneering forays into a No-Man’s-land of drama. Today they are no less securely based as entertainment than is the stage or the cinema. You can, that is to say, sit at home and enjoy a television play even if you have not got the slightest interest in developing technique.
The new viewers who are now coming in will be unaware that what they look upon as a more or less mature art has so recently emerged from its magic-lantern stage. That is a measure of what quick workers have been attracted into the service at Alexandra Palace.
Having worked in the theatre in Liverpool, having reviewed radio drama for several years, and in being married to a prominent thespian, Wyndham Goldie was especially sensitive to the specificities of television as they impacted actors.
From the point of view of the play, each roomful of viewers is an audience in itself. Producer and cast have to remember that they are playing in a sitting room rather than in a public place. If an actor looks straight into the lens of the television camera, he seems to the viewer to be looking quite naturally and directly at him…
‘Immediacy’ – to use a word chosen by both [stage and film producer] Mr. Basil Dean and [actor and Royal Family cast member] Mr. D. A. Clarke-Smith in their very valuable talk in the sound programmes last week – is another peculiarity of television plays.
Mr. Dean spoke of the ‘effect of immediacy – spontaneity, if you like – which is certainly not present in a genuine sense in even the best film where the intimate love scene has probably been carefully rehearsed and taken – oh, how manv times would you say?’
A television actor has to go· right ahead, sometimes after pretty slender rehearsing. He has the advantage, which he shares with the stage actor, of continuity – that is to say, he carries a scene through with all its momentum of emotion from beginning to end, and does not, like the film people, have to do it in bits with intervals of days or even longer.
On the other hand, he lacks, of course, the stimulus of the audience, which no one who has played across footlights can lose without regret.
It would have been easy and unadventurous for the television producers to have been content to take their cameras back into long shot and merely to photo a play. It would also have been ineffective. Instead, they have come to grips with the novelty of their job.
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