OTD in early British television: 29 December 1938
John Wyver writes: ‘Are you wondering whether to get a television set or not?,’ critic Grace Wyndham Goldie (above, c. 1937) asked in her Listener review-of-the-year column dated Thursday 29 December 1938. ‘Then let me assure you,’ she continued, ‘that plays are staggeringly successful on the television.’ Taking off from Wyndham Goldie’s round-up, I intend with this post to (start to) celebrate her rich and remarkable writings about pre-war television. Towards the end, I also want to share a mystery and to ask for help in solving it.
Who was Grace Wyndham Goldie?
Born in Inverness-shire in 1900, Grace Murrell Nisbet was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College before taking first a degree at the University of Britstol and then one at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked as a teacher, married the actor Frank Wyndham Goldie and followed him to Liverpool, where she read plays for the Liverpool Repertory Theatre and wrote a book about the institution. The couple came to London in 1934, and Grace (forgive the use of her first name only from now on) began to write for The Listener, initially reviewing radio drama.
Grace’s first column about television is dated 16 June 1937, nearly eight months after the official BBC service had started from Alexandra Palace. (There is no record that she ever saw 30-line television). In ‘Viewing television’ she wrote:
I have been spending a good deal of time lately wacthing television. Now I admit that the whole of this television business goes slightly to my head. I cannot get used to be a ‘viewer’. I find it difficult to realise that this miracle, this phenomenon, is actually here and a part of our daily lives. But it is.
Moreover, television was not a freak or a curiosity, but was already a ‘successful, day-to-day entertainment’. Grace wrote four further columns about television for The Listener in 1937, threaded among contributions about programmes by one or more anonymous writers. These other columns are mostly descriptive, with only tentative value judgements, whereas Grace embraced adjectival phrases and sought out the more experimental elements of the service; of Scenes from The Dybbuk, played in Hebrew and presented in a boldly expressionist style, she hymned the broadcast as ‘strange, disturbing and powerful’.
In 1938 she filed 14 columns about television, at a rate of roughly one a month, and the following year ther were 31 weekly despatches, right up to the war-enforced closedown at the start of September 1939. Each essay is between 600 and 700 words in length, making a total of around 32,000 words, and most are illustrated by two, three or four relevant photographs.
During the war Grace worked at the Board of Trade for two years, before in 1944 joining the BBC as a radio Talks producer, replacing, as Leonard Miall’s informative Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry notes drily, Guy Burgess. In 1948 she transferred to television, where she was the driving force in developing current affairs, including ground-breaking General Election coverage in 1951, and later the magazine series Tonight and Monitor. As Miall writes:
Her high standards and her mastery of television techniques made her a valuable trainer of production staff who sought attachments to an expanding and highly regarded department. Without children herself, she particularly enjoyed recruiting and training youngsters. She excelled at starting new programmes, and making sure that they began well, but she tended to interfere with the minutiae of programme content, and it was not always easy for producers, especially the women, to work with her. She was described as having a whim of iron.
Retirement was imposed in 1965, by which point she had become head of talks and current affairs, and a decade later she wrote a definitive book about television and politics, Facing the Nation (1977). She died in 1986.
Why is her writing so important?
Grace’s Listener columns are the most acute, most thoughtful, most knowledgeable and most rigorous writing that we have about television broadcasts in Britain between 1937 and 1939. They trace her journey of learning to watch television, and her parallel path of learning how to write about the programmes. As well as, of course, the innovations and experiments, the break-throughs and mis-steps of the producers at Alexandra Palace.
Her writings are deeply informed by a knowledge of the production processes of the new medium (she visited AP on several occasions before the war, describing the building as ‘derelict, mouldy, cold [and] draughty… a horrible place’), but they are always written from the perspective of the viewer at home, with references to the domestic hearth and occasional mentions of the birds chirruping away in her garden.
Each essay is elegantly written, invariably witty, and just occasionally quietly angry. She believes in television, and because of this she wants to ask hard questions of it, questions about its ethics, its aesthetics, and indeed its ontology. And above all she finds television thrilling, as is apparent in the end-of-the-year column noted above and with its masthead illustrated here.
After running through a list of successful plays that she has seen during the preceding twelve months of 1938, she poses a rhetorical question, which is a favourite trope of hers:
Do I seem excited about all this? Well I am. But not, I assure you, unduly. This television is a terrific business. Television drama, unlike broadcast [that is, radio] drama, but like the theatre and the talking film, is a final form. It will always be with us.
And there is another thing. Television plays, unlike films, depend on words. So television drama is likely to be a new literary medium. Here, in fact, is a drama of the future for us to see and hear and for writers to write. And if being in at the birth of that isn’t exciting I don’t know what is.
Bliss was it in that dawn of television to be alive, but to be writing about it for The Listener was very heaven.
As I develop these blog posts over the coming months, further quotations from Grace will unquestionably take a key role. Her words feature prominently in my forthcoming Magic Rays of Light: British Television between the Wars.
And, if possible, I want to make her writings more widely available in an annotated edition of Grace’s Listener columns, ideally to be published open access. In this form, I believe they would be an invaluable resource for future scholars of broadcasting and cultural history, as well as a collection from which a handful of general readers might derive interest and pleasure.
Who is the literary executor for Grace Wyndham Goldie?
But here’s the mystery. To date, I have found it impossible to track down anyone representing Grace Wyndham Goldie’s estate. BBC Pensions administer The Grace Wyndham Goldie (BBC) Trust Fund, but despite helpful exchanges with them, I have not been able to make contact with anyone from the estate. So can I ask if anyone knows who I might speak with to follow up on this?
And if you are interested in reading more, perhaps start with Tise Vahimagi’s short biography for BFI Screen Online. There’s a fine 2015 Guardian essay by Charlotte Higgins, ‘Prejudice and a BBC pioneer – the amazing story of Grace Wyndham Goldie’. And especially valuable, David Hendy introduces Grace as part of the invaluable Voices of the BBC Centenary project, and provides a link to the transcript of a hugely entertaining and informative oral history interview with her, conducted by Huw Wheldon in December 1977.
Mary Irwin’s scholarly article ‘Grace Wyndham Goldie at the BBC: Reappraising the ‘first lady of television’ is published in the journal Critical Studies in Television 17:3 (2022) [£], although this concentrates on her work as a current affairs producer and executive in the 1950s and ’60s. And in 2006, Grace’s friend and colleague John Grist authored the private published biography, Grace Wyndham Goldie: First Lady of Television (which is eye-wateringly expensive to buy, even on eBay, but a delight if you can borrow it from a library).
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