OTD in early British television: 3 February 1939
John Wyver writes: ‘Oho! Here’s another television experiment,’ is how Grace Wyndham Goldie began her review of Death at Newtownstewart, first broadcast on the afternoon of Friday 3 February 1939. The critic’s top line response was that, ‘it failed.’
Nonetheless, as a review in The Times detailed, the broadcast was clearly genuinely innovative, and as Wyndham Goldie recognised, ‘an experiment like this, in the present state of television, is a hundred times more interesting than any ordinary, trivial success on established lines.’
Death at Newtownstewart, a reconstruction of a murder trial from the 1870s, was written and produced by Irish playwright and producer Denis Johnston. He had mounted this as a radio broadcast eighteen months earlier, but as The Times recognised, ‘[t]he televised version was not quite like anything we have seen before.’
Working with transcripts of the trial, as actors portraying witnesses appeared on screen recounting events ‘the view dissolved and changed to that of the events being described.’ Some events were re-enacted four times, as described by four different witnesses, with new details being added.
We were in fact seeing the building up of evidence on the screen, much as it is built up in the Law Courts, only it was a visual impression.
Johnston was able to achieve a variety of scenes, including one taken outside the studio in the AP grounds, and he ended in the cell of the condemned prisoner
with a horrific close-up of the murderer to end it all. For those who enjoy elucidating a mystery, or piecing together evidence, or who are interested in the new possibilities of television production this was a great occasion.
Wyndham Goldie begged to differ, as she wrote:
Death at Newtownstewart was not nearly as satisfactory an example of television as it was of sound broadcasting. Why? Mainly because during quite half of the programme the words were complete in themselves and vision was an unnecessary accompaniment.
Let me pursue this. The reason why trials make such good sound broadcasting is that everything in them is described in words… the listener is in exactly the same position as a member of the jury. He knows nothing about the murder except what he is told, and the whole purpose of the speeches of counsel, the evidence of witnesses and so on, is to build up gradually in his mind a picture of the circumstances of the crime…
But in television the effect is quite different. For here everything is seen as well as described… So the whole thing seems full of repetition. But that is not all. For the result of seeing an event instead of merely being told about it was often to destroy the dramatic effectiveness of the next piece of evidence.
The effect of sight, in fact, was to show us too much and so to blur the shape of the original programme. Instead of moving forward on a continuous thread of suspense we leapt backwards and forwards with very little rhyme and just as little reason.
Wyndham Goldie’s argument is interesting in relation to the particularities of radio and of television as distinct mediums, and especially so at this early moment in the development of the latter. Her observations are a strand of what makes her writings for The Listener in these years so valuable.
But her reasoning depends on what is seen being the case, being a kind of objective truth, whereas what The Times piece details is that in Death at Newtownstewart there were multiple different visual representations of the same element of evidence – and it was up to the viewer to choose which one to believe.
The ambiguity of, and contradictions between, the visuals was what seems to have made the piece so compelling – and so original. And Wyndham Goldie, usually so astute in her responses, appears to have missed this entirely.
Denis Johnston had also recently adapted a German play about a murder trial, Ernst Toller’s Die Blinde Gottin, produced as Blind Man’s Buff at the Abbey Theatre in 1937.