OTD in early British television: 26 February 1939
John Wyver writes: On Sunday 26 February 1939 Sight and Sound was a studio ‘bee’ hosted by Sir Kenneth Clark, youthful director of the National Gallery known to friends and peers as ‘K’. Seated in a wide semi-circle with K at one end, four artists were tasked to identify verse quotations, and four poets had to recognise details from famous paintings.
‘The poets won,’ K later recalled, although the accuracy of his charming autobiography, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (1977; link to text at archive.org), is somewhat undermined by his claim that this was television’s first programme about the visual arts. Not only had Talks already produced numerous such transmissions, but K himself had presented one several months before, introducing reproductions of Florentine masterpieces in the nation’s collection.
The artists taking part in Sight and Sound were a mixed bunch. Duncan Grant was probably the best-known then, just as he is now, celebrated as much for his relationships amongst the Bloomsbury Group as for his paintings and ceramics. Five years or so before the broadcast K had commissioned the glorious 50-piece Famous Women Dinner Service from Grant and Vanessa Bell (and pictured here in the splendid exhibition of her work which has just closed at MK Gallery).
Barnett Freedman was a much-in-demand commercial artist, illustrator and typographer, who in 1935 designed the postage stamp issues to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V. Brynhild Parker was a realist painter associated with the East London Group, and like Newman an illustrator who had also designed posters for Shell. And Nicolas (sic) Bentley was a writer and catoonist.
The heavyweight amongst the poets, at least to our eyes now, was Stephen Spender, two days shy of his 30th birthday, a member of the Communist Party and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Among much else he later became a celebrated collector of modern art. Lining up alongside him was fellow Faber & Faber author George Barker, who like Spender had been championed by T.S. Eliot.
Walter J. Turner was an older poet who had been on the fringes of Bloomsbury who later penned a number of biographies of major composers. And Winifred Holmes was, as the Bear Alley blog informs us
was a popular writer of poems in the early 1930s, some of which were published in Argosy, and her reputation meant she became part of a circle which included Eliot, Auden, Isherwood and Sitwell. Her verse was broadcast on the BBC and she narrated the verse commentary for the documentary Cover to Cover.
After the war she became a documentary filmmaker, directing among other productions A Cruel Kindness (1948), Consider the Carpet (1948), Growing GIrls (1949) and A Brother for Susan (1953; link to online copy) as well as scripting others.
Starting out on a television career that would culminate triumphantly with the 13-part Civilisation for the BBC in 1969, K had in December 1937 presented a 17-minute Artists and Their Work broadcast describing reproductions of Florentine paintings in the National Gallery, the institution he had been director of since 1934.
After the war, among many other positions in public life, he was appointed as the first Chairman of the Independent Television Authority, before returning to being in front of the cameras with a series of lectures about art for ATV from 1958.
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