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
John Wyver writes: One of the things I love about researching early television is how bare programme listings can lead down the strangest and most unlikely rabbit holes. Take the line-ups for the two Picture Page editions on Tuesday 5 more
John Wyver writes: the evening of Tuesday 3 January 1939 saw a studio repeat presentation of Denis Johnston's contemporary comedy The Moon in the Yellow River, produced for the cameras by the author himself. The satire had been first more
John Wyver writes: 'ls the 'straight from the theatre' stuff going to be satisfactory?' That was the question Grace Wyndham Goldie posed following the live broadcast of Twelfth Night from the Phoenix Theatre (above) on the evening of 2 more
John Wyver writes: In keeping with the aspirational tenor of Alexandra Palace's lifestyle programming for its professional middle-class viewers, each winter there was at least one studio broadcast for those looking forward to, or dreaming about, a ski-ing holiday across more
John Wyver writes: The conventional forms of conventional politics on television are absent from the pre-war Alexandra Palace service. There was no television news, and Panorama, the first regular current affairs magazine show would not debut until 1953. But there more
John Wyver writes: for a month now, I have been writing more or less daily blog posts about pre-war British television, linking each one to a programme or event that took place on the same in one of the years more
John Wyver writes: for whatever reason, pre-war television on Christmas Eve was largely unremarkable, although the Baird Company's 30-line broadcast on 24 December 1931 appears to have been the first to be described in the billings as 'A Christmas programme'. Frustratingly, more
John Wyver writes: On the evening of Monday 21 December 1936 extracts from from the current stage production T.S. Eliot's religious drama Murder in the Cathedral were played for a third time at Alexandra Palace. Despite having to work within more