OTD in early British television: 5 February 1939
John Wyver writes: The evening of Sunday 5 February 1939 was taken up with a 105-minute version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with John Abbott as Prospero and actor, writer and poet Stephen Haggard as Ariel. Playing Caliban was George Devine, after the war the co-founder and artistic director of the influential English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Trinculo was Richard Goolden (who many, many years later I saw giving his legendary Mole in Toad of Toad Hall), and Peggy Ashcroft was Miranda.
The producer was the creatively ambitious and, as one writer trailed, ‘experimental-minded’ Dallas Bower (header image), who we have already encountered on several occasions in these posts. An unrepentant modernist and unabashed intellectual, Bower is something of a hero for me. He is also, as I have said elsewhere, the figure at AP with whom I most closely identify.
One of the first appointments to the Television service, Dallas Bower co-produced with director of television Gerald Cock Television Comes to London, the film documentary shown on the high definition service’s opening night. In the studio he produced numerous variety broadcasts as well as devising Pasquinade, the first ‘revue’ specially conceived for television. He developed shows, including Burnt Sepia and Dark Highlights, that showcased Black entertainers, and as camera technique developed, he and his colleagues began to innovate with studio stagings of drama.
He is also one of few producers at AP of whom we have a vivid character sketch, by Michael Barry: ‘Rimmed spectacles thrust forward, he would converse rapidly in short sentences, punctuated by chuckles that allowed no time for response. He took it for granted that a new listener shared his knowledge of the film and musical worlds… and one needed a quick wit to keep up. He should have been the most infuriating of fellows, but an ingenuous openness made him an agreeable companion.’
Among Bower’s notable productions was The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, with British Guyanese actor Robert Adams (above) in television’s first lead role for a Black actor. His modern-dress staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with Sebastian Shaw as Brutus (below), was set in a European fascist state, and was the first drama to use projected shadows from a ‘penumbrascope’ for its settings.
Most controversially, as we saw in a recent post, in 1938 Bower presented act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for the cameras, earning him a description by Gerald Cock in his staff review the following year as ‘Incorrigibly “highbrow’’, and as such valuable!’. In all of his work, and in his eclectic writings about film and television, he demonstrated a passionate belief in a modernist aesthetics for the new medium.
Emboldened by the success of Julius Caesar, Bower planned the ambitious staging of The Tempest. At the start of the year, and again the focus of an earlier post, he worked on an outside broadcast from the West End of Twelfth Night, with Peggy Ashcroft as Viola, and the actor asked for the part of Miranda.
The full resources of Alexandra Palace were mobilised, with the production spread across both studios, with seven cameras, and the BBC Television Orchestra playing Sibelius’ incidental music. Of the opening, the critic for The Times wrote that it was
magnificent and raised the highest hopes. To the power of Sibelius’s storm music was added the sight of all the mariners on a rocking ship in deep distress… the action was urgent and dramatic, and the scene was beautifully conceived and carried out. Nothing later in the play came up to the grand scale of the opening.
The writer was enchanted by Peggy Ashcroft, however, hymning that,
The airy fairy spirits who melted into thin air by trick photography did less to create the atmosphere of the enchanted isle than did Miss Ashcroft’s wide-eyed wonderment.
Instead of conventional scenery, Bower employed two ‘penumbrascopes’ to conjure up shadowy projections, but overall this appears to have been a more traditional approach to a Shakespeare text than Julius Caesar.
The production was plagued by technical problems, however, and the producer apologised to Gerald Cock in a memo summarising the reasons for ‘the disastrous results.’ The balance between the dialogue and the orchestra was far from optimal, he admitted, and studio mistakes included a prompter standing in the foreground of a shot and a property man appearing in vision.
In mitigation, and as an illustration of the strictures of working at such scale at Alexandra Palace, he pointed out that only two hours’ rehearsal time with full technical facilities had been scheduled. Cock was forgiving, acknowledging the constraints of time and space. ‘But it was a noble effort!,’ he wrote. ‘There were some excellent production ideas.’
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