John Wyver writes: at 3.01pm and again at 9.01pm on Monday 18 January 1937, via the Marconi-EMI system, Alexandra Palace transmitted a 15-minute programme of folk songs and sea shanties by the Arts League of Service (ALS). Bunny Churcher, John more
John Wyver writes: the evening of Monday 17 January 1938 saw the first broadcast (with a repeat on the following Friday afternoon) of Royston Morley's hour-long adaptation of John Webster's Jacobean drama, The Duchess of Malfi. The classical more
John Wyver writes: on the evening of Wednesday 16 January 1935, a 40-minute, 30-line broadcast featured singers Maisie Seneshall and Harold Scott, along with prima ballerina Lydia Sokolova with Harold Turner as her junior partner. Both Turner and, to more
John Wyver writes: the afternoon of Saturday 14 January at 3.30pm saw the second presentation of what was now, given the timing of the the transmission, somewhat incongruously named Schubert Night. I previously noted the first broadcast on 9 more
John Wyver writes: on Thursday 13 January 1938 the schedule carried an outside broadcast from the Chiswick headquarters of the London Transport Passenger Board. The focus was the training of a London bus driver, created as what in the language more
John Wyver writes: Tuesday 12 January 1937 saw the first broadcast from Alexandra Palace of a series titled The World of Women. Conceived by producer Cecil Lewis, who was soon to depart for Hollywood, the fortnightly strand of broadcasts on more
John Wyver writes: after Alexander Calder yesterday, we can continue the theme of early television's engagements with modernism by focussing on New Architecture, a 17-minute talk on Tuesday 11 January 1938 given by John Summerson and prompted by the more
John Wyver writes: tucked into the evening schedule on Monday 10 January 1938 was a ten-minute broadcast titled Alexander Calder's Mobiles, and there's a case to be made for this as the first television programme conceived as visual art; not, more
John Wyver writes: on the afternoon of Friday 8 January 1937 Dallas Bower produced Burnt Sepia, a half-hour variety line-up billed as, in the racially derogatory language of the day, ‘an all-coloured cabaret’. This was television’s first variety programme featuring more
John Wyver writes: on Friday 7 January 1938, when Alexandra Palace broadcast a circus OB, a Pepler masque from Aesop's Fables, a fashion show, and Archie Harradine revue and a dramatisation of W.W. Jacobs's horror story 'The Monkey's Paw', more