OTD in early British television: 21 January 1939
John Wyver writes: This is a cautionary little tale about the perils of live television – and of roller skating. The main offering on the evening of Saturday 21 January 1939 was producer Harry Pringle’s Cabaret bill featuring comedy xylophonist Sid Plummer, funny stories from Gene Plummer, Gene Sheldon’s banjo act and The Four Sensational Macks, seen at AP above. The following Monday a page 10 Manchester Guardian story was headlined, ‘SKATERS FALL FROM TABLE – Television Accident’.
Here’s a slightly shortened version of the report:
An accident occurred during a television “turn” at Alexandra Palace on Saturday when two Americans, Mrs Larne Mack, and her partner in a roller-skating act, Mr Ray Copeland, crashed off a table on which they were performing. Viewers saw Mrs Mack fall to the floor; her partner disappeared behind the backcloth, which broke his fall.
Mr Copeland, however, was knocked unconscious and dislocated his shoulder. Mrs Mack had severe bruises to her face. Immediately the incident happened the turn was “cut”. Scores of telephone calls were made to the studio by those who had watched the programme.
Mrs Mack told a reporter yesterday: “We were taken to hospital… My partner was holding me by one ankle and swining me in the air with my face towards the floor. He swings me up and down five times while we are roller-skating on the table. It was when I was at the top of the third swing above Mr Copeland’s head that we slipped off.”
As a bonus today, mostly because below is such a great picture, here is Paul Nash giving an Artists and their Work television talk on Surrealism a year before the skating incident, on the evening of Friday 21 January 1938.
The work is ‘Angel of Anarchy’ by Eileen Agar, a now lost sculpture that was included in the November 1937 exhibition ‘Surrealist Objects and Poems’ at the London Gallery run by Édouard (‘ELT’) Mesens. (A related work, also titled ‘Angel of Anarchy’, is with Tate, and the webpage details the history of the two pieces.) Louisa Buck gave an account of the opening in a 2021 article for Frieze:
London Gallery private views were famously excessive and riotous. There was scandalized press coverage of the midnight opening of their ‘Surrealist Objects and Poems’ exhibition… with guests including Henry Moore being served sausages and whiskey whilst the artist Julian Trevelyan gave a speech dressed as a blind explorer.
Among the throng was Shelia Legge, self-styled ‘surrealist phantom’, who spent the evening hitching up her skirt to bare a leg painted with a grinning mouth and a demon figure, while Herbert Read, the leading art critic of the day, urged the inebriated gathering to appreciate the bizarre array of exhibits, describing them as ‘angels of anarchy and machines for making clouds’.
It’s doubtful that AP saw any such surreal scenes.
The catalogue of the major 1981 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, edited by Sandy Nairne and Nicholas Serota, includes photographs of ‘Surrealist Objects and Poems’, and in one of these Eileen Agar’s artwork can be seen. A footnote in the catalogue notes that this version of ‘Angel of Anarchy’ was sent to the ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ at the Galerie Robert, Amsterdam in spring 1938. ‘It was never returned from Amsterdam.’
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