OTD in early British television: 20 March 1937
John Wyver writes: On the afternoon of Saturday 20 March 1937, following a display of model aircraft, producer Dallas Bower oversaw the first transmission of the 35-minute Pasquinade, claimed as the first original revue for the new medium. Conceived in his ‘incorrigibly highbrow’ manner (the description is director of television Gerald Cock’s), Bower brought together the talents of, among others, dancer Maude Lloyd, writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, and actors Hermione Baddeley and Valerie Hobson (above, photographed by ‘Sasha’ in 1937).
Asked in 1925 to define ‘revue’, stage producer Charles Cochran proposed that,
It occupies an intermediate place between variety art and the art of the fully organised play; and in that place it has many and diverse expressions.
Revue in the theatre mostly relied on small ensembles whose members, drawing on music hall traditions, interacted with the audience as they demonstrated versatility, ingenuity and playfulness. In interwar London and certain larger cities it was intimate revue that became what James Ross Moore has described as ‘the era’s most vital, innovative and influential form of theatre’.
Television from Alexandra Palace on occasion picked up elements of stage revues, as in September 1937 when scenes were shown from the Arts Theatre Club presentation Copyright Reserved, and six months later from Spring’s in the Air, from the Chanticleer Theatre revue.
In a typical display of his erudition, Bower claimed (as The Stage reported) that the title came from Asquino, a cobbler of fifteenth-century Rome, whose lampoons won him greater fame than his shoe repairs. (My internet search failed to find any corroboration of such a character.) In keeping with this, the revue was said to ’tilt at modern institutions’.
Lewis had apparently composed a satirical ‘one-way song’ for Pasquinade, although from the running order in the Programme-as-Broadcast form it is not clear which item this was. Songs put over by Baddeley, who had been a cast member of the celebrated 1925 Cochran-Noel Coward revue On with the Dance, were titled ‘Emaciated Lady’ and ‘Arrival’, while Hobson, who two years before had starred in the Hollywood feature Bride of Frankenstein, performed ‘Sailing in the Breeze’.
Also in the cast were Australian Cyril Ritchard, later to be a famous Captain Hook to Mary Martin’s Wendy, and Lawrence Hanray, father to Ursula who appeared as Alice in television productions of ...In Wonderland and …Through the Looking Glass in January and April 1937 respectively.
Baddeley, Ritchard and Hanray played a sketch, seemingly written by Bower, called ‘Balletomanes’, while ‘Divertissement’ to music by the revue’s composer William Walker was a dance performed by Maude Lloyd. At this point, a mainstay of the Ballet Rambert, Lloyd was known especially for working with choreographer Antony Tudor, and it is likely Tudor devised this for her since he was also a regular collaborator with Bower.
Among the songs and dances, Bower inserted Calphurnia’s Dinner Party, a short drama by littérateur Maurice Baring, who had served with distinction during the war with the Royal Flying Corps and who was known for his books on Russia and a string of not-quite-first-rank novels.
‘He can only do one thing,’ noted Virgina Woolf of Baring’s writing, ‘himself to wit; charming, clean, modest, sensitive Englishman.’ His sketch for Pasquinade featured the characters of Calpurnia (Baddeley), Caesar (Hanray) and ‘Slave’, played by veteran silent film actor Harding Steerman.
Heady stuff all round for an early spring afternoon.
Pasquinade was repeated on the evening of the same day, and a second Pasquinade in May embraced sketches titled ‘Big Business’ and ‘The Face of War’, as well as a rendition of the enticingly titled ’Surrealist Song’.
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