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OTD in early British television: 16 December 1937

16th December 2024

John Wyver writes: At 21.07 on Thursday 16 December 1937 the Television service from Alexandra Palace broadcast the sixth in the series Experiments in Science. This 16-minute edition had the subtitle Reconstructing the Past, and featured Margot Eates of the Institute of Archaeology, assisted by Delia Parker and Ione Gedye, demonstrating the reconstruction of prehistoric fragments of pottery from Maiden Castle in Dorset (above, from the west, photographed by Major George Allen in 1937).

This broadcast is a focus for Sara Perry’s exemplary article ‘Archaeology on television, 1937’, published in Public Archaeology in 2017 [subscription needed], and one of the few essays to take seriously an aspect of pre-war television programming. The general assumption remains that programmes about archaeology began in 1952 with Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, but as Perry writes:

While the archival record is patchy and often vague, it clearly testifies to the fact that archaeologists were actively involved in the conception, development, and circulation of television broadcasts from at least 1937. London’s Institute of Archaeology (IoA) played a particularly pivotal role in shaping some of these broadcasts, supplying much of their content, supplementary visual materials, and presenters…

[I]t is not a coincidence that the IoA is deeply implicated in these productions. Founded around the same time as the genesis of public TV in Britain, the Institute was a savvy exploiter of media for economic, political, and intellectual gain.

Perry traces the correspondence initiated in early 1937 by Alexandra Palace producer Mary Adams with Mortimer Wheeler, then director of both the IoA and the London Museum. Adams had seen at the IoA’s home in Regent’s Park a small display related to recent excavations at Maiden Castle, and the exchange led first to a Picture Page appearance on 9 June 1937 presented by its Assistant Keeper, Martin Holmes, and marking on the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Preparations for this broadcast meant that Adams was in touch with the IoA’s Assistant Secretary and Maiden Castle volunteer/press assistant, Margot Eates, and on 14 July 1937 Eates gave a 17-minute talk about work at the Iron Age hill fort. Adams must have been pleased, since Eates was invited back in December to give, with colleagues, what in Perry’s words ‘appears to be the world’s first practical televised broadcast of archaeological methodology’.

The broadcast appeared to aim at replicating a laboratory experiment on television — and, critically, that experiment exactly mirrored the activities of the Institute’s Repair Lab, whose central concern was for ‘the repair of pottery, the treatment of archaeological objects of all sorts and the construction of archaeological models’.

Eates’ assistants in the programme, Delia Parker and Ione Gedye [credited as Irene in the Radio Times billing] , were the Repair Lab’s only two employees, and the programme seems (we have no script and of course no recording) very similar to lessons given to students at the IoA.

Perry argues that for the importance of the short broadcast, which was

effectively about the presentation of a visual methodology, and therein it presaged programmes like Time Team [starting 1994], which are often assumed to be amongst the first television shows to attend to methods/objectives ahead of finds, … by nearly sixty years. In so doing, it provided graphic testimony to the IoA’s institutional mission and proficiencies.

Not only did the IoA benefit from the exposure of its methods in this way, and the modest cultural capital accrued, but it was also apparently paid £21 for the services of the personnel, for the supply of photographs and models, and for their transport and insurance.