OTD in early British television: 15 December 1928
John Wyver writes: Saturday 15 December 1928, 96 years ago today, is a milestone date in the history of early television in Britain. Or at least it should be, since the day saw the transmission of the first television drama in Britain, a version of John Maddison Morton’s Box and Cox. The accolade of this ‘first’ is invariably given to the 1930 Baird Company/BBC transmission of Luigi Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. Yet the medium’s long tradition of drama began with a demotic comedy, not a fragment of anguished modernism.
Almost all the histories laud the Pirandello transmission while Box and Cox goes unnoted (Lez Cooke’s British Television Drama: A History is an honourable exception). Nonetheless before the end of 1928 the Baird Company team working with a 30-line mechanical scanning system were achieving images of a significantly greater expanse than just the head and shoulders that they had begun with.
‘A whole stage scene showing two athletes giving an exhibition boxing bout,’ was noted by one observer, who enthused about ‘the small, but clearly recognisable images of the combatants and their every movement, which at times were particularly rapid.’ This demonstration from a 5 metres by 3 metres stage was followed by one of a cyclist riding around a ring.
Employing this extended although still fixed frame, the one-act, three-character Box and Cox was played in December. Based by author John Maddison Morton on a French vaudeville sketch Frisette, premiered in 1846, the drama’s broad humour had earned it considerable success throughout the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria was apparently much amused by it, and Lindsay Anderson even directed a version at the Royal Court in 1961.
Wikipedia offers a detailed plot summary, but its comic core is a landlady renting the same room to two men, one of whom works days and the other nights, with neither being aware of the other. The header image and caption comes from February 1929 the monthly Television, an issue that was graced by this cover.
The credited producer was Gordon Sherry, about whom I can find nothing further, and the cast was Lawrence Baskcomb, Stanley Vilven and singer and actor Vivienne Chatterton, later a regular on Mrs Dale’s Diary and said to have an ‘unusual talent for every type of dialect’. The minimal action was all played in the frame of a single set, as can also be seen in this rehearsal image, also from Television, February 1929.
Box and Cox was not the world’s first television drama. That was The Queen’s Messenger broadcast by a local station in Schenectady, New York in September, 1928 (and the story of which is in itself fascinating). Moreover, Baird Company booster and journalist Sydney Moseley later acknowledged of Box and Cox that ‘one saw only the crudest outlines of the characters’. Even so, he continued, ‘the significance of the performance impressed the few who were privileged to witness it.’ (The Graphic, 2 August 1930) Significant enough, certainly, to mark this day.
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