My previous post sketched the start of the story of The Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green and of the BBC’s outside broadcasts which began from there in December 1946. This second of three posts picks up the relationship with the second broadcast from N13, of the Broadway comedy Junior Miss.

The television service of the time was unable to negotiate access to mainstream theatres because of the obstructive attitude of the Theatrical Management Association (TMA). Most stage producers believed that live television transmissions would reduce the numbers of those who would buy tickets in the conventional manner. But the owner of the Intimate, Fred Marlow, was prepared to deal directly with the BBC and as a consequence his modest rep house in north London provided fourteen live dramas over a period of three years. Yet there were constant frustrations, caused both by the temperamental television technology of the time and by the TMA’s pressure on copyright holders to deny the Intimate permission to stage certain popular plays. The frustrations are mostly dealt with in a third post in this series, which is still to come.

After the broadcast of George and Margaret by Gerald Savory on 2 December 1946, the BBC returned within the month for Junior Miss, another successful comedy adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields from Sally Benson’s semi-autobiographical short stories that had first appeared in The New Yorker. The BBC’s formal letter offering terms for Junior Miss detailed the technical arrangements, which appear to have remained the same for each transmission from The Intimate Theatre over the following three years:

Our three cameras will be installed in the front row of the circle. It will be necessary for the whole of the front row to be removed and for the whole of the second to be reserved. [...] Our lighting will also be installed in the front row of the circle. (Letter from P. H. Dorté to Frederick Marlow, 12 December 1946, WAC T14/593/1)

The installation of the equipment occupied the whole of Sunday and a rehearsal was conducted from 3.00-5.30pm on Monday 30 December, on the afternoon just before the evening transmission. In his internal programme report, OB producer Campbell Logan noted, ‘I had only three days in which to see the show before actual production, which is not really long enough.’ (Programme report, 31 December 1946, WAC T14/593/1). He also regretted that a different OB unit was assigned to the broadcast, despite the experience that had been gained by the team who worked on George and Margaret.

As with George and Margaret, one of the three cameras played up, ‘showing bad interference’. Intended to provide the long shots of the stage, this camera according to Logan ‘was pretty well useless and only used for fading in and out the beginning and end of each scene’. The shot from a second camera ‘was distorted and the edges of the pictures was very dark; but it had to be used as there was no alternative’. Only Camera 3, which gave a close shot, worked as it should, and Logan praised the camera operator in his report:

Wright did an excellent job on the C. S. camera and mastered some very neat split second panning. A little wobbly to begin with but ultimately very satisfactory. The M. S., I’m afraid, missed some of the action, as I found it very difficult to recognise the characters owing to the darkness of the edge of the pictures but the blame for this, of course, is entirely mine.

Nothing of Junior Miss was recorded, nor is there any moving image archive of any of the other Intimate broadcasts, but from the programme report we can see that the whole of the two hour fifteen minute broadcast (excepting the two intervals, during which a caption card was broadcast from Alexandra Palace) was effectively carried by just two cameras, one of which was technically unsatisfactory. The experience of watching long, long shots from the same camera would have been very different from the rapidly cut, multi-camera coverage with which we are familiar today.

Despite the difficulties, the BBC’s outside broadcasts manager Ian Orr-Ewing noted in an internal memo just over a week after Junior Miss that ‘provided the radio interference can be reasonably reduced [this was one of the causes of the camera malfunctions], we shall be making  visits to the Intimate Theatre every six weeks or so.’ (Memo from Ian Orr-Ewing, 9 January 1947, WAC T14/593/1). There was also concern from the London County Council that audience members were sitting too close to the lights in the balcony. But Orr-Ewing felt that this problem could also be satisfactorily addressed, especially if, as his colleague Tony Bridgewater noted, ‘wives and relations of the staff’ could be excluded from the area immediately adjacent to the equipment.

The BBC returned on 18 April 1947 for St. John Ervine’s play Anthony and Anna,  during which Campbell Logan’s cameras seem mostly to have behaved themselves, even if, as he recorded, ‘the production itself struck me as appallingly static’. (Camera report, 21 April 1947, WAC T14/593/1) It appears, however, that although studio cameras could by this stage cut from one shot to another, shot changes on OB mixing desks could still be achieved by comparatively lengthy mixes of several seconds’ duration. Regretting that this was still the case, OB manager Ian Orr-Ewing also recorded his own disappointment with the production:

I think the play was badly cast and poorly acted. This may have been due to the unfortunate withdrawal of the usual producer (Ronald Kerr) [...] With regard to the view that it would have been better produced in the studio, I think if such a bad production had been given in the studio it would have been quite unbearable, whereas, with a very live audience reaction, I felt it was entertainment value. (Memo by Ian Orr-Ewing, 23 April 1947, WAC T14/593/1)

The technical demands of these broadcasts were also leading to tensions between the OB engineers and the production department’s expectations. In a long memo to Ian Orr-Ewing, Tony Bridgewater argued that rehearsal time should be cut to allow engineering an adequate time to prepare.

I must stress the fact that a full length Theatre relay is, from an engineering point of view, one of the most difficult operations that we tackle. For one thing all the cameras are ranged on the same small area and therefore each is compared very critically with the other, and the great length of the programme in turn necessitates aiming at a higher general standard since blemishes which might be excused or overlooked on a short programme tend to become very conspicuous and monotonous on a longer one. (Tony Bridgewater to Ian Orr-Ewing, 23 April 1947, WAC T14/593/1)

Orr-Ewing’s had-written response noted that ‘unfortunately [I] sympathise with both sides. Until new equipment arrives which can be set up quickly and which is reliable I see no solution to the problem.’

The technical presentation of the shows improved as the BBC mounted further broadcasts from the Intimate. The quality of the stage productions, however, often still left much to be desired. Of Harry Relf’s The Family Upstairs, transmitted on 27 June 1947, Campbell Logan wrote in an internal memo

The play, I thought, was a very bad one but seemed to command a boisterous audience reaction. It is a very popular play with repertory companies however, and I suppose makes a tolerable evening’s entertainment of the little theatre type. (Camera report, 27 June 1946, WAC T14/593/1)

Perhaps it was felt politic to ‘rest’ Campbell Logan from the next production, and the OB of Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears on 5 September 1947 was presented for television by Harold Cox. He too had camera problems, with the last two acts having to be covered by a single mid-shot camera only; there was also a breakdown in the signal going to Alexandra Palace in the last act, which necessitated the use of a caption card accompanying the OB sound only for a minute or so. Television programme director Cecil McGivern, however, was more concerned that the cast used words and apparently expletives which were not in the script. ‘This is very noticeable in Rep. Companies, where the casts seldom manage to be word perfect. I think this happened a lot in French Without Tears.’ As a memo to Ian Orr-Ewing made clear (dated 12 September 1947) he was not happy about what he felt was the slackness of the OB department in allowing this to happen.

By this stage in the relationship between the Intimate and the BBC, the Corporation was beginning to suggest to Fred Marlow which plays he might consider mounting. One production file in the BBC Written Archives Centre includes a seven page list of all the plays that the Intimate had mounted through to 1947, some on several occasions, and this was clearly used by the BBC producers to encourage the theatre to consider new productions of certain favoured scripts. The production of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy appears to have been particularly successful, as Campbell Logan (who had returned to overseeing the broadcasts) wrote to Fred Marlow (15 January 1948, WAC T14/593/2):

Everyone was full of praise, and were particularly delighted by the performance of Monia Stutfield. I would be grateful if you let me have some information about her – where she comes from, where she has been working, etc, as the powers-that-be are anxious to have information on this subject.

The Intimate Theatre presentations appear to have attracted the notice of television reviewers only very rarely. One significant discussion, however, was a column for The Listener by the critic Harold Hobson about the broadcast of The Winslow Boy:

Television, so far as the drama is concerned, seems to be uneasily in the position of the cinema thirty-five years ago. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Sarah Bernhardt and Sir Herbert Tree used to make films by simply photographing stage plays… Similarly, from time to time, television presents us with what is in essence a talking film of a stage play. (‘Theatre v. studio’, 29 January 1948, p. 194)

Later to be the distinguished (and feared) theatre critic of The Sunday Times, Hobson here brought together a sympathetic interest in television’s journeys to the Intimate with a faintly dismissive atttitude to the theatre’s audience:

Throwing aside its experiments, its studio effects, [television] retires to the fastness of the Intimate Theatre in Palmer’s [sic] Green and shows us what the locals are getting for their three-and-six. On these occasions nothing is done – or seems to be done – to adapt the performance for television purposes; the dramatic beverage is served up as for the suburban cognoscenti, and the television camera drinks it neat. If television drama is itself an art, with its own laws, its own limitations and its own peculiar possibilities, the result ought to be disappointing. Often enough it is; but not more disappointing – this is the really disturbing thing – than most studio performances: Palmer’s Green and Alexandra Palace, Tweedledum and Tweedeldee.

Hobson goes on to praise in particular the performance at the Intimate (and on the screen) of David Raven as the barrister Sir Robert Morton in Terence Rattigan’s drama. But although the broadcasts could occasionally attract positive notices like Hobson’s, and although they appear to have been popular with audiences (they pre-date the start of detailed audience figures), these ‘dramatic beverages’ from Palmers Green were soon to be troubled by copyright wrangles that would force, first, a relocation to an Alexandra Palace studio and then the ending of the Intimate partnership. The story will continue in a third part of this post.

The list of the semi-regular live broadcasts from The Intimate Theatre between December 1946 and August 1949 is as follows:

• 2 December 1946    George and Margaret by Gerald Savory
• 30 December 1946  Junior Miss by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields
• 18 April 1947             Anthony and Anna by St. John Ervine
• 27 June 1947            The Family Upstairs by Harry Delf
• 5 September 1947    French without Tears by Terence Rattigan
• 6 January 1948         The Man from the Ministry by Madeleine Bingham
• 13 January 1948       The Winslow Boy by Terence Rattigan
• 20 February 1948     The Ghost Train by Arnold Ridley
• 8 April 1948               The Shop at Sly Corner by Edward Percy
• 13 May 1948              Quiet Wedding by Esther McCracken
• 8 July 1948                 Distinguished Gathering by James Parish
• 16 September 1948   Acacia Avenue by Mabel and Denis Constanduros
• 14 October 1948        Children to Bless You by G. Sheila Donisthorpe
• 15 August 1949          Two Dozen Red Roses by Kenneth Horne

Note: The image and caption of the BBC cameramen at the 2 December 1946 presentation of George and Margaret comes from The Palmers Green and Southgate Gazette, 6 December 1946, as reproduced in Geoff Bowden’s book Intimate memories: The history of the Intimate Theatre, Palmers Green (Westbury: The Badger Press, 2006)

The quality was patchy, at best, and of the 1948 transmission of The Shop at Sly Corner the television producer wrote, ‘the performance itself was indifferent and there was some very bad miscasting’ (Campbell Logan, ‘Camera report’, 9 April 1948, WAC T14/593/2). But the members of the Theatrical Management  Association (TMA) were preventing the BBC from having access to more prestigious theatres. As a consequence, the broadcasts from The Intimate Theatre were the most significant engagement between the London stage and television in the immediate post-war years. This post, which is the first of three, considers both the potential and the problems of the ‘Intimate’ relationship.

The Intimate Theatre, which is still used for the presentation of plays today, was built in 1931 as a church hall. Four years later the young actor John Clements converted it into a theatre with a resident professional repertory company . Clements was subsequently to become a significant film actor and theatrical producer and also to play a key part in early television drama (on which, see my post about the 1957 film International Theatre: The Wild Duck). At the end of 1935, however, at the age of 25 he was the star and producer of a presentation of A. A. Milne’s comedy The Dover Road, the debut of his newly founded Intimate Theatre. Praising ‘a promising start’, The Times reported that

The venture is the first attempt made in North London to bring the theatre within easy reach of a population which in recent years has grown enormously. The company intends to stage new plays at short intervals before presenting them at London theatres. (‘The Intimate Theatre’, 28 December 1935, p. 6)

Over the next three and a half years, The Intimate Theatre – in traditional rep fashion – staged a new show almost every week. By August 1936 Clements’ group was attracting a committed local audience and he was sufficiently confident to make extensive interior alterations to the hall and to consider ‘a similar experiment in another part of London’, although this seems not to have materialised (‘Repertory in North London: a successful venture’, The Times, 5 August 1936, p. 10). On 15 July 1939 the Intimate Theatre company was also presented by BBC radio in an adaptation of Hugh Walpole’s The Cathedral.

The house of around 450 seats closed for a time during the war, but it opened again in August 1941 under the management of the former variety agent Frederick Marlowe. The programme mixed rep stalwarts – mostly comedies and thrillers – with occasional new plays and presentations of the classics. Clements left soon after its re-opening to pursue his film career, after which many of the productions were produced by Ronald Kerr. Kerr worked at The Intimate Theatre until 1947 and then again for nearly a year after May 1950. (He committed suicide on 20 March 1951, the day after he was arrested for ‘importuning male persons for an immoral purpose’; homosexuality, of course, was still illegal at the time.)

My knowledge of the early Intimate Theatre is derived from Intimate Memories: The History of the Intimate Theatre, Palmers Green written by Geoff Bowden (Westbury: The Badgers Press, 2006). Bowden’s admiring study is packed with titles and dates, photographs and anecdotes, and it takes the story of the Intimate right through to its date of publication. Fourteen of its two hundred-plus pages are devoted to what are excitedly described as ‘The Television Years’. Much of Bowden’s information for this period comes from the three Intimate Theatre OB production files in the BBC Written Archives Centre (T14/593/1-3), on which these posts also draws heavily.

It is not clear from the production files how the first broadcast from the Intimate came about. In the final year of the pre-war television service, the BBC had undertaken fourteen outside broadcasts from central London theatres, starting with a transmission of J. B. Priestley’s When We Are Married from the St Martin’s Theatre in November 1938 (on which, see my post From the London Theatre, 1938-1939). But when television began again in June 1946 the TMA was unwilling to allow the return of cameras to the West End (see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom Volume IV: Sound and Vision, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 207). The Corporation’s commitment to the relationship with the Intimate over the next three years, despite the many difficulties, demonstrates how important live theatre played before an audience was to the BBC, even if the productions had to come from a house mounting them in just one week in one unchanging set.

The Palmers Green and Southgate Gazette set the scene in its front-page report on the first broadcast:

It was an excited and rather tense audience that filled the theatre well before time for the curtain raising. Up in the circle was installed part of the mechanism of the wonderful trick of television; in the centre, three massive cameras, of weird design to the untechnical eye, and at either end a group of huge floodlights.

Each piece of apparatus had its attendant genie, the cameramen wearing headphones through which a constant stream of direction reached them from one of the vans outside. Down in this van a further group of technicians was receiving the television on a screen and carrying out certain processes, one known simply as ‘mixing’. (‘World premiere in history of television’, 6 December 1946)

The BBC and Fred Marlow had started talking about a broadcast from the Intimate in October. Marlow was paid £59 as a facility fee, from which he had to pay the cast, and the copyright fee for the play was £31. Easily the most substantial item in the £333 6 shilling budget was the £150 charge paid to the Mole, Richardson company for the lighting and generator. Marlow agreed that instead of continuing with his usual one-week turnaround he would keep a production on for a fortnight, so that it could be seen by the production team on its opening night and appropriate preparations made for a broadcast on the Monday evening eight days later.

The chosen play was George and Margaret, a comedy by Gerald Savory that had enjoyed a successful run in the West End in 1937 and which had been filmed by director George King in 1940. (Savory was later to be a notable producer and television drama executive, first for Granada and then for the BBC.) Featuring some way down the cast list was the actor John Whiting, who would later become a noted dramatist himself, writing    The Devils (1961) which would become the basis for Ken Russell’s notorious 1970 film. Ronald Kerr had overseen the staging, and The Palmers Green and Southgate Gazette recorded his address to the theatre audience just before curtain up:

‘I am not going to do what I believe is done sometimes [he said] – that is, I am not going to ask you to laugh, because hollow laughter would be worse than none. This great battery of lights makes you visible to each other and you may find this embarrassing, but do not let it deter you, if you are really enjoying yourselves, from laughing like anything.’

Transmission was from 7.15pm until just after 9.30pm, with two eight-minute intervals, marked only by captions on screen, and towards the end of which bells were rung over the incidental music to simulate those that summon theatre patrons back from the bars. But despite a smooth dress rehearsal in the afternoon, on the night things did not go well for outside broadcast producer Campbell Logan. Early in the broadcast he lost the picture from the Super Emitron camera with a 6-inch lens which he had intended to use for close-ups. As a consequence almost the whole of the play was shown through a single Standard Emitron with a 12-inch lens which ‘gave a magnificent M. S. [medium-shot] and carried the whole show’. Logan’s third camera ‘gave an interesting establishing shot, but was too small to use for the action of the play. It was used in this way once to remind people that they were in the theatre.’ (‘Programme report’, 3 December 1946, WAC T14/593/1)

Employing an aerial mounted on what looked like a fire-escape ladder, the pictures were transmitted by a radio link to the ‘receiving site’ at Swains Lane in Highgate, from where they went by a G. P. O. cable to Alexandra Palace. (That such a link could be established from Palmers Green must have been a factor in the BBC’s choice of The Intimate Theatre as a rep house from which to attempt broadcasts.) This part of the process seems to have worked smoothly, and the broadcast pictures were clear and stable. Despite the camera problems, the transmission received a rapturous write-up in the local paper:

With a cup of coffee near to hand, a soft carpet beneath my feet and a fire glowing rosily, testing the shadows’ depths with its lazy flickering, I saw and hear George and Margaret in comfort in the home of a friend on Monday evening. In other words, I was at the receiving end of the Intimate Theatre’s televised comedy – and a grand experience it was. [...] There were five of us looking-in, and all were impressed by the brilliance of the Intimate players’ bubbling enthusiasm, skill and polish. [...] Reception was admirable: the sound perfect. The laughter of the fortunate audience heartily coincided with our own less dignified outbursts as the gems of dialogue flowered. We missed, perhaps, those close-ups, which would have admitted us even more intimately to the family circle, but only those acquainted with television would have noted it. (quoted in Geoff Bowden, Intimate Memories, pp. 70-71)

In a follow-up letter to Fred Marlow, Campbell Logan made light of the technical problems:

From all accounts, in spite of the mishap to our close-up camera, the show appears to have gone down very well. I hope very much that you will think it worthwhile repeating the experiment at a future date. (Campbell Logan to Frederick Marlow, 3 December 1946, WAC T14/593/1)

Marlow most certainly did, and inside the month the BBC outside broadcast van was once again parked alongside the Intimate for a transmission on 30 December 1946 of the Broadway comedy Junior Miss by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields. Part two of this series of posts (which is appearing rather later than I intended) will consider that production and those that followed, while part three will examine the difficulties on which the BBC’s Intimate relationship eventually foundered.

Today’s blog post derives from a transcription I have completed of an oral history recording made by the BECTU History Project which has conducted several hundred interviews with practitioners in the film, television, radio and theatre worlds (listening copies of these are accessible via the BFI National Library in London). Screen Plays is also conducting its own interviews with people who have worked in television and material from these will also appear on the blog in due course.

Joan Kemp-Welch (1906-1999) was, as the BFI Screenonline biography of her states, ‘One of the first women directors to work in television in the 1950s’. It is her earlier career on stage and film, however, which is best served by the interview. It is really unfortunate that shortly after the conversation moves firmly into Kemp-Welch’s television career at Associated-Rediffusion the recording seems to end prematurely. The BFI holds three audiotape cassettes, which are labelled as 1, 2 and 3 of 3. At the end of side B on the last of these tapes the interviewer says, ‘Shall we break?’ This is not, clearly, the end of the interview, as Kemp-Welch is in full flow and we have only reached 1961, with decades of her long career yet to be covered, but the BFI have checked their shelves and, sadly, no further tapes seem to have survived.

So what useful things do we learn about Kemp-Welch’s television career, and specifically her work on television productions of stage plays, from this BECTU interview? The interview is a great illustration of the BFI Screenonline biography (cited above), filled with personal anecdote and giving an overwhelming sense of a practitioner of great versatility and drive, and it offers us some valuable glimpses of her attitude towards adapting the plays to the confines of the commercial schedule, the enormous advantages of having been a theatre director when working on plays in the studio and and the difficulties of being a female television practitioner in the 1950s.

First, a little background. Kemp-Welch loved the theatre as a child and it was while training to be a teacher that she started acting in an amateur dramatic society. Her first professional acting gig was under Peter Godfrey at the Gate Theatre in London and she also worked as an assistant stage manager, a role which enabled her to spend her time ‘learning every single thing I could by watching performances’. In the 1930s she also started to act in films (which paid more than the stage), taking small parts in, for example, the 1935 British films Admirals All and While Parents Sleep. Her role as the wet-nurse in The Citadel (1938) brought her to wider prominence, and she went on to act in Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Busman’s Honeymoon (1940) and They Flew Alone (1942). Her stage career continued alongside: she performed in the long-running and widely touring Ladies in Retirement from 1939, for example. which was the first play to open in the West End after the war began.

She had tried her hand at directing before the war, but not without difficulty: ‘I had always wanted to direct. Whenever you [i.e. a woman] suggested it, it was always a big laugh, it really was. People thought you were crazy’. She managed to get a position directing a small company in the East End of London which went on to win a national competition, after which she was asked to adjudicate nationally. Of the finals of one competition in Glasgow, she says, ‘you had to watch three shows and then immediately get up on the stage and discuss and criticize each show and then make a final adjudication and that was a help towards directing too. You had to think quickly’. She moved more fully into stage direction at the beginning of the 1940s, running the repertory theatre in Colchester and the Wilson Barrett company in Scotland.

For the start of commercial television in 1955 she was approached by the first Independent Television company Associated-Rediffusion to come on board as a television director: ‘I said yes immediately’, she recalls, ‘Anything for something new.’

Despite her strong theatrical background she was, surprisingly, not contracted to work on drama from the beginning. She say that this was probably because she was a woman, but it may also have something to do with the fact that she happened to be extremely good – award-winning, even – at the other things she was asked to do. She started off with over sixty magazine programmes for women, the music show for teenagers Cool for Cats, and a lot of light entertainment, including Outside Broadcasts from the Hammersmith Palais.

Pinter's the Lover

Before long, however, her talents were once again directed towards directing plays, and the list of play titles she recalls working on for television transmission testifies to the fact that they were pretty much all, as she puts it, ‘pretty solid things’: ‘we did Electra in Greek, we did The Lover – that’s Pinter’s The Lover – Midsummer Night’s Dream, Three Sisters, Princess Alexandra’s wedding, Design for Living, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, The Vortex, a pantomime Richard Whittington Esquire, Le Malentendu by Camus, A View from the Bridge, A Pain in the Neck, A Cold Heart, Lady Windermere’s Fan’.

She considers that she had been ‘blessed by god with an outside slice of imagination and very much visual imagination. I’ve always been able to picture things and I think [...] I’ve always been filled with [...] new ideas and new pictures. That comes very easily to me and therefore it was all a help in television because there were a lot of things that I did for the first time, for instance, the first time for a play that cameras in the studio were ever taken outside [for the television play God and Tony Lockwood in 1961]. I spent about a month imploring the powers-that-be to let me try because I thought it would be so exciting to do the exteriors with television cameras and did the first one’.

She earned the Prix Italia for her 1963 production of Pinter’s The Lover. She was also, as BFI Screenonline informs, the first woman to receive the Desmond Davis Award for creative work in television. The year previously she had directed the television version of the Dimitris Rondiris’ internationally touring stage production of Sophocles’ Electra by the Peiraïkon Theatron company which was presented on television in modern Greek translation, with no subtitles! (Read more in my post on that production here.) When asked, at a press conference, whether this did not seem an unusual production for Associated-Rediffusion in that it was apparently indifferent to the likely number of viewers, she replied, ‘I do a show for myself and never look at the ratings’ (Anon., ‘How’s your Greek?’, The Guardian, 21 September 1962, p. 12).

In the same year she directed The Typewriter, a newly located copy of which received a rare screening in summer 2011 as part of the BFI Southbank’s UnLOCked season. My colleague John Wyver, writing about it for the Screen Plays blog, considers that she ‘directs with a style that makes frequent use of extended shots; one in particular lasts for more than three minutes without an edit. Choreography within an uninterrupted shot is a trademark of classical studio drama, and Ms Kemp-Welch here proves herself to be a past master of the technique’. It is a great pity that the interview does not cover these years, nor the rest of her work up to the 1980s.

Margaret Johnston in The Typewriter

On the script of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream – which she did for Rediffusion in 1964 and which received ‘one of the biggest audiences up to that time for a television production of Shakespeare in Britain, largely for the appearance of Benny Hill as Bottom’ (BFI Screenonline) – she says:

I knew we had to cut it. I had George Rylands, the great Shakespeare expert at Oxford, and he was asked to be in charge of the literary side, because they were slightly nervous about it, the first they’d ever done as a commercial proposition and he said to me when we first met – we got on terribly well – and he said we’ve got to cut it and I would reckon that we cut about 500 lines. You cut a version and I’ll cut a version. And out of those 500 lines we only differed on 40 of them. So that was … it means cutting is fairly obvious. I did all the Chekhov plays … he is difficult to cut. A line that seems nonsense in the first act becomes of vital importance in the last act. These were really difficult.

When asked about the ‘morality of cutting someone else’s work to fit within a commercial time segment’, she responds in entirely pragmatic terms: ‘Well, people like Ibsen and Chekhov wrote when television and films didn’t exist, therefore they wrote what they thought was necessary for their play, but I am absolutely convinced that if they were here today and had to write a play for television they would automatically cut it. They would cut it themselves — I don’t think there is any question about that at all. Therefore, as I say, I really do try, when I’m directing, I really do try to put before the public what the author had wanted them to know’.

She considers that directing plays for television is not very different from directing them for the stage: ‘Rehearsals are much the same. It’s a different technical background. The lighting is different and […] the movements of the camera are as important as the movement of the actors […] and you have got to weld them together so it becomes a more … an interesting problem’. She believes her long experience in the theatre stood her in good stead for her television work, in more ways than one:

I think I had an enormous advantage over the fact that I had a knowledge, a really very good knowledge of lighting. […] I was lucky in the fact, again, as far as scenery was concerned, you see, because I had so often designed scenery in the theatre, moved it myself, built sets myself, you know, handled them, I was then in a position to know what people on the floor could and couldn’t do. This was an enormous help because I never asked them to do something which was impossible or which I myself couldn’t do and if they said they couldn’t do it I would very often go down and show them how to. And that’s, you know … in the same way in the theatre as a woman director I was jolly hated, because they hated having women in the theatre, and they used to play tricks on you, you know. For instance, if you asked for floats, if you asked for more floats, they wouldn’t move them, and they would say, ‘Is that better?’ because if you look at lights they get brighter anyway, so you can’t tell if they’ve taken out so they used to test you like that, you see. And then if you would say I want them jumped please, if they jump them, you can tell them. And so they could … you caught them out. Or, I knew all the different colours by the numbers and the names, so If I said I wanted a 51 and they put in a 53 I would know it wasn’t a 51. I think you had to know your job.

The interviewer asks who ‘they’ were, and she responds ‘Stage-hands. Electricians’, noting however that ‘It was amazing that the second they knew you knew the job there was no problem at all’.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand (1866) is rare amongst television adaptations of stage plays in that it was a drama never originally intended for theatrical production, but as an epic verse drama set out in dialogue as a script to be read. The play contains a scene of a storm at sea and concludes with an avalanche, both seemingly beyond the limitations of nineteenth century staging, and if performed uncut (as on its first staging in Stockholm in 1885), would run for a demanding six and a half hours (Michael Meyer, ‘Introduction to Brand’, in Ibsen, Henrik, Plays: Five, 1986, p. 16).

Contemporary critical reaction to the play upon its publication considered it a work of literary, rather than dramatic merit: ‘This poem can only be called dramatic insofar as it is written in the form of dialogue… the play on which the curtain here rises belongs only to the theatre of the imagination’ (Ditmar  Meidall, in Aftenbladet, 7 April 1866, cited in Michael Meyer, Henrik Ibsen: The Farewell to Poetry 1864-1882, 1971, p. 53). Prior to its staging by the ’59 Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1959, Brand had only been performed professionally in Britain for one performance in 1912 (Meyer, 1986, p. 17).

On the London stage in 1959

The 1959 Hammersmith production was presented for an extended run of several weeks as part of a six month residency at what was then the Lyric Opera House by the ’59 Theatre Company, under the production of Casper Wrede and the direction of Michael Elliott. The season (of both new and classic plays) employed a repertory company of actors, including Dilys Hamlett, Patrick McGoohan, Fulton MacKay, Peter Sallis and Patrick Wymark. Michael Elliott was an inexperienced theatre director, but had worked extensively for television, having spent the previous few years directing plays for the BBC, including a production of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea in 1958.

Brand was presented in a new translation, intended for performance, written in verse by Michael Meyer at short notice. This version cut the play extensively, the performance having a running time of two and a half hours, including two intervals. The production was staged with impressively bleak and vast mountain sets designed by Richard Negri (see the photograph at lighting director Richard Pilbrow’s A Theatre Project) and required highly complex lighting for the different open air conditions specified in the play, including the sea storm and avalanche (Meyer, Not Prince Hamlet, 1989, p. 164).

The role of Brand (who is onstage for virtually the entire play) was a difficult one for Patrick McGoohan to successfully realise, being a character who is presented in a state of heightened religious fervour from the first scene of the play when he appears on an arduous mountain pilgrimage. In previews, McGoohan had played the role at a great emotional pitch from the outset, which left audiences wearied. Elliott decided on the day of the press night to instruct McGoohan to restrain his performance until the final act: ‘He went into McGoohan’s dressing room before curtain-up and, since McGoohan was an explosive and unpredictable actor, asked him to hold back and not release emotionally too early’ (Meyer, speaking in Vince Serks, All or Nothing: Brand in Retrospect, documentary film on the Network DVD of Brand, 2003). This withholding of intensity led to the play’s climactic scene having a galvanising effect on audiences, though Meyer also suggests that this pacing meant that audiences were less engaged in the earlier scenes of the play (Serks, 2003).

Meyer describes the final act of the 1959 production, leading up towards the avalanche, as being a great theatrical experience:

Then came the fifth act. Ibsen was a master of the final act, but he never wrote a greater one than in Brand. When the villagers who have followed Brand up the mountain turn on him and stone him, McGoohan suddenly unleashed all his terrifying power, and from then until the final moments, when the gypsy Gerd fires her rifle at the supposed hawk and brings down an avalanche on them, the audience was gripped as seldom happens in a theatre. Michael had designed a marvellously simple yet effective method of suggesting the avalanche. The rifle-shot evoked a distant boom, the pale sun behind the gauze began slowly to contract and distend like a human heart, the darkness and the roar intensified until, following Brand’s cry: ‘If not by Will, how shall man be redeemed?’, there was a sudden silence, the invisible ghost of Agnes replied: ‘He is the God of Love’, the avalanche descended with redoubled force and the curtain descended with it. The audience rose and cheered; never have I heard a reception to equal that. (1989, p. 165)

Meyer also describes the complete effect of the gunshot and avalanche as being created by the full extent of the Lyric Opera House’s auditorium: Gerd’s rifle being pointed towards, and fired at, the front row of the gallery and the increasing rumble of the avalanche reverberating and echoing around both the stage and the audience (Serks, 2003). What is apparent from descriptions of the stage production is that its most successful achievements came from its unique theatricality, and the exploitation of the spatial and temporal circumstances of the Lyric Opera House. When the production was adapted for television, the same sense of vastness could not be recreated on the same scale in the television studio or on the small screen. The domestic audience would be much freer to abandon watching the play than a captive theatre audience, meaning that Elliott’s advice to McGoohan to slowly build his performance might have a different effect on television.

On BBC Television adapted for World Theatre in 1959

The World Theatre series presented a very catholic repertory of plays, with (as its title implied) a strong international bent. A BBC Press Release describes the philosophy behind the series as being to present plays that ‘have been chosen from many sources. They are designed to capture the flavour of international playwriting rather than necessarily represent the greatest plays of all time which are, of course, a matter of individual opinion’ (BBC WAC T66/102/2). The 1959 season offered nine plays by Shakespeare, Buchner, Lorca, Jonson, Brecht, Pirandello, Sheridan, Ibsen and Galsworthy. Being presented in such a repertory meant that a production of Brand might not seem as exceptional a project as one might expect, having been preceded by other European plays that would have been unfamiliar, and might have seemed difficult, to audiences.

Elliott’s background in television direction meant that the ’59 Theatre Company had been commissioned to produce two of the plays in the season, his production of Danton’s Death having been transmitted on 19 May 1959. Although no tape was kept of this production, the BBC Audience Research Report (BBC WAC VR/59/273) indicates that it shared many stylistic features with Brand. Viewers reported an unrelenting sense of intensity in the production, realised in a ‘verbosity of dialogue – without relief’, some of the sample found the play to be highly gripping, and to rise to ‘really dramatic heights’, while many others found the production to be ‘too depressing and “heavy” to appeal’. Although the cast were considered to be good, viewers noted a tendency to over-act and to deliver lines too fast, while the austere staging and stark lighting (which appeared to use a greater intensity of darkness and brightness than normal) divided audiences between those who found it disagreeably symbolical and those who found that ‘its visual austerity had heightened the impact of the play by enabling viewers to pay full attention to the words’. All of these aspects of production are also found in Brand and indicate a particular directorial style and approach by Michael Elliott.

Brand was recorded at the BBC’s Riverside studios and, despite the play’s avalanches and sea storms, appears to display little evidence of filmed material edited into the production, an aerial shot of Brand standing in the courtyard of the new church, seen from the vantage point of the bell tower (with a large bell ringing in the foreground of the picture) at the beginning of Act IV, and the final shot of the ghost of Agnes suspended in the black sky, seem to be the only obvious interpolations into an ‘as live’ recording.

The design of the production, both visual and aural, adopts a style of starkness and simplicity. The spectacular and inhospitable exteriors of the play (Act I, high in the mountains; Act II, a village by the fjord and a farm above the fjord; Act III, outside Brand’s house; and Act V by the highest farm above the village, returning to the mountain heights) are realised in variations of the same stony, stepped, flooring. This setting is altered for each exterior by the addition of flats around it of mountains, the facades of a villager’s cottage or Brand’s house, and the use of dry ice to convey the altitude of the mountains. To convey the sea, an area of the stones is cleared to show a flat dark floor. The effect of this stark staging is representative, rather than detailed, replicating the experience of watching the play in the theatre.

Meyer (Serks, 2003) sees this simplicity of design as being a drawback, the ‘primitive’ television studio conditions of 1959 as being unsuitable for a play of exteriors. While it is hard to see any contemporary television production utilizing similar staging techniques, Gordon Roland’s design does work very effectively in conveying the vastness and inhospitality of the mountain and fjord landscape of Brand. A photograph of the filming of the production[1] illustrates how this effect was achieved. One camera has been moved onto the playing area of the mountaintop and is filming a close up of Olive McFarland as Gerd, recorded overhead by two hand-held microphones on poles. Two further cameras are recording on the edge of this playing area, unable to be manoeuvred any closer to the performance by the raised floor of the staging. The full extent of a very small area of the studio is being shot from a distance to create the impression of vast expansiveness. The studio conditions that precluded realistic exteriors[2] are being instead exploited to create a sparse performance space to draw attention to performance.

A similarly unobtrusive effect is created by the adaptation’s supporting soundtrack, which does not use music. A consistent sound effect is used to signify various settings; an icy and cutting wind for the mountain, a storm for the fjord and a bell for the church. No effects of water or snow are used for the set pieces of the storm or the avalanche. The climax attempts to recreate the aural effect of the avalanche in the theatre by Gerd’s gunshot precipitating a rumble, which increases in volume, while Brand and Gerd fall to the ground while the camera is rocked. This final scene could not be described as spectacular. The lack of any snow, or white lightning, combined with the general, rather than specific, threat of the rumble leads the viewer to concentrate upon the responses of the two characters, as opposed to their circumstances. The fast pace of this scene and the excitability of the shouts of Gerd and Brand make it hard to follow the words that they are speaking, making the apocalyptic impression of this scene more general than precise.

At the point of Brand’s burial and death, where he has cried ‘Answer me, God, in the moment of death! If not by Will, how can Man be redeemed?’, a voice ‘cries through the thunder’ and answers, ‘He is the God of Love’ (Ibsen, 1986, p.112). In the theatrical production the voice was invisible (though supplied by Agnes). In the television version, the apparition is shown to be Agnes, in a white angelic costume, suspended in a black sky. The effect is highly striking, and accentuated by the cut away from the mountain peaks (which are not shown again) to the figure being combined with the sound of the avalanche rumble being completely stopped and being replaced with no sound other than Agnes’ voice. The end credits are shown against a background of darkness and the sound of howling winds.

The reappearance of Agnes, speaking to Brand conveying a message of God’s love is foreshadowed by the apparition of her ghost, who addresses Brand a few minutes before the avalanche. In accord with the bare aesthetic of the production, the figure is not very spectral, with no spectacle being made of her appearance or disappearance. Dilys Hamlett, who played Agnes, was sceptical as to the effectiveness of this stark scene:

Looking at it now, I thought that she was a little too off the ground. What I personally don’t think worked was at the end when Agnes was the ghost. I would have liked it to have been more hidden than that. I would have liked it to have been much more mysterious. I think that in the theatre it probably worked because it seemed, to me now, rather theatrical and I would have preferred it to have been more mysterious and more remote and maybe not quite so charged, because when we were on the stage the ghost scene was like a balancing between Agnes and Brand in which Agnes was then, in heaven, as strong as Brand was on Earth, so one wanted to convey that feeling that she had come through. But I think that, in a way, it looked a bit theatrical on the tape. One would probably do it differently now. (Serks, 2003)

Hamlett perceives theatricality here as being a quality of liveness and unadornment, the addition of effects to convey mysteriousness making the performance less spontaneous and more clearly mediated. An opposing view of this scene would see the lack of mist and luminescence in the realisation of the ghost as serving to focus the audience’s attention onto the meaning of Agnes’ reappearance to Brand at this stage of the play, offering little in the way of visual distraction.

Styles of performance

Patrick McGoohan’s performance as Brand is played at a tenor that is unfamiliar in subsequent television drama. This intensity of performance is evident in both his speech and appearance. When Brand speaks, the impression made is animalistic; the voice both growls and wavers and sometimes appears to yelp at points of rhetorical conclusion, McGoohan often speaks much faster than would be effective in any conversation and lines of speech suddenly jump into higher volume and more forceful emphasis in a jolting fashion. The facial expressions that McGoohan uses are as striking and defined as the speech that he uses; sudden frowns and settings of the mouth and jaw. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this animated facial physicality is the way that McGoohan uses his eyes, rarely appearing to make direct eye contact with other characters but flickering his eyes aside, only looking at his wife, and even them quickly looking away.

The emphatic quality of this interpretation may not have altered greatly between The Lyric Opera House and Riverside studios, Meyer suggests:

Patrick’s performance was really a bit too big for television. He wasn’t yet a skilful film actor, knowing that you had to do rather little and that the camera would do the rest, and this enormously powerful performance he’d given was a little bit too explosive for the small screen. (Serks, 2003)

Whilst it is true that McGoohan’s performance bears little affinity with the ‘aesthetic of detail’ that John Caughie describes as constituting successful television acting (‘What do Actors do when they Act?’, British Television Drama: Past, Present & Future, Bignell, Lacey & MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, eds., 2000, p.167), it is also not quite the form of early television acting described by Caughie as ‘emotional signalling’, performed with a degree of physical animation and vocal emphasis that might suit a theatrical performance intended to be recognisable to the back row of a gallery identified as being used by Peter Cushing as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty Four (BBC, 1954) (Television Drama: Realism, Modernism & British Culture, 2000). In that performance, it is clear what the emotions being signalled by Cushing are: fear and oppression. McGoohan’s interpretation of Brand is, for all its force and volume, in part defined by concealment of signalled emotions. The way in which the character rarely looks at those characters that he is addressing, and uses a strange vocal register, could be said to be befitting for an epic verse play that Ibsen did not write for performance. The effect that McGoohan’s lack of conventional responsiveness to fellow performers in Brand creates is one of a character in torturous judgement upon himself, in soliloquising conversation with God more than with his fellow mortal humans.

McGoohan’s style of acting is not the only one used amongst the cast of Brand. The performances of Peter Sallis, doubling as the Doctor and the Provost, and Patrick Wymark as the Mayor are of a similar, comparatively subtle, tenor to that of Andre Morrell’s appearance in 1984, praised by John Caughie as being more successfully televisual than other performances in the same production (Televsion Drama, 2000, pp. 48-49). The speaking style of both actors is much quieter and more naturalistic, using conversational inflections and they use slight facial mannerisms in contrast to Brand’s agitation. In Elliott’s production the mayor is given a prop that is not specified by Ibsen, resulting in ‘business’ with a cigar. This contrast of registers of acting between performers is dictated by Ibsen’s scenes, rather than by the performers’ decisions.

In the 2003 RSC production the theatre audience received the scenes featuring these characters most responsively because of their comparative quiet and lack of rhetoric. The Doctor, Provost and Mayor are all worldly characters with pragmatic concerns whose dialogue displays a political ability to manipulate the actions of the listener they are talking to, even of a fervent figure like Brand. The existence of these scenes, with their more naturalistically realised characters and concerns, alters and relaxes the rhythm of the play (although the Doctor brings tidings of death and foreboding) and even, in the Mayor, creates opportunities for humour.

The 1959 production is the only occasion that Brand has been performed on British television, and it is hard to see how such a character could be portrayed in a quiet way, a point made by Peter Sallis when he says that McGoohan’s approach was the only possible interpretation for an actor playing the central role: ‘You can’t diminish Brand for the television camera’ (Serks, 2003).

Audience appreciation

The BBC Audience Research Report for Brand shows that it played to a small minority of the television audience (8% as compared to 44% for the Play of the Week shown on ITV at the same time) (BBC WAC VR/59/471), a sample who appeared to respond positively, giving a reaction index of 62%. Responses of this sample were cool towards the source Ibsen play: ‘they described it as too deep, too difficult, to heavy and unrealistic and ‘positively depressing’ (BBC WAC VR/59/471), while the smaller proportion of the sample who reacted positively use terms like complex, sombre and grim.

Reaction towards the production was more enthusiastic than that shown towards the play, with the acting commended (‘with rare exceptions, considered really splendid’), and appearing to be the chief attraction of the production (‘”It was the brilliant acting that made me watch this play”, commented a Clerk’) and especially McGoohan’s performance (‘his performance as Brand was variously described as “truly Oscar-winning”, strong, brilliant and powerful; he “did a terrific job in sustaining all that high emotion throughout the play”‘). This positive commendation of McGoohan as Brand seems to indicate that, at this stage of television drama, audiences were prepared to accept, and be excited by, performance styles that took a different approach to Caughie’s ‘aesthetic of detail’, an aesthetic of forcefulness and demonstrative conviction in performance. The mentioning of performance being sustained and working inexorably in the Audience Research Report, would indicate that the adaptation had the same narrative effect upon the television audience as Meyer recollects it having upon the theatrical one. Where the source material made it suitable, in tragedies of expansive figures, audiences recognised highly theatrical performance of intensity and power as being a style that they could watch with approval and excitement.

Acknowledgements

This article is an outcome of the research project Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council from 2010-14; © Billy Smart 2012.

The framegrabs are taken from Brand in the Region 1 BBC Worldwide DVD box set The Henrik Ibsen Collection, available only in the USA and Canada; © BBC.

In this long post, I consider the other programmes that accompanied this viewing marathon, before going on to contextualise the production of Agamemnon, the first play in the trilogy, in terms of its place in Channel 4’s cultural programming schedule, think through some of the aesthetic effects of the production’s translation to the small screen and, finally, consider the contemporary critical response to the production.

Culturally educative viewing

The television version of the National’s The Oresteia was prefaced, earlier in the week, by two accompanying programmes. On Tuesday 4 October, a special edition of the Today’s History series, transmitted under the title The Weight of the Past, connected the themes of the Oresteia with ‘modern instances of revenge as a route to justice’, asking ‘how a society ever emerges from feuds to the rule of law’ (Channel Four Television: Press Information, 1-7 October 1983). This programme was illustrated by extracts not only from the Channel 4 production but also from the 1977 Sicilian film Padre, Padrone (directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani), which had recently been shown on Channel 4, and the recently released Handgun (written and directed by Tony Garnett, 1982).

On Saturday 8 October, the day before the trilogy was transmitted, the one-hour documentary The Oresteia at Epidaurus featured the company’s tour to Greece in the previous year when they had received the honour of performing the first ever non-Greek-language production of a Greek play in the open-air ancient theatre of Epidaurus. But Andrew Snell’s documentary also deftly weaves together an enjoyable and accessible introduction to the issues of the trilogy, ancient performance conventions and modern production choices through interviews with Peter Hall, Tony Harrison, Harrison Birtwistle, Jocelyn Herbert, the classical scholar Oliver Taplin and several of the actors, including Greg Hicks and Tony Robinson (who was, around this time, becoming well known as Baldrick in the British historical sitcom Blackadder).

Much of the commentary in part one of the documentary focuses on the use of masks, with Peter Hall offering his interpretation of their power and facility, Jocelyn Herbert commenting on their use on the stage and the actors talking about how they began to find ways of working with the masks in rehearsals. The second half of the programme is more concerned with the new, muscular and rhythmical translation by Tony Harrison who, giving an interview sitting beneath a tree on the ancient site of Mycenae, talks about the nature of the play; this is endorsed and taken further by commentary by the scholar Oliver Taplin. We see the final rehearsal, watch the theatre slowly fill up on opening night (although it is still daylight), and the performance beginning. Some key moments from the drama are shown and the documentary ends with the rapturous standing ovation from the 15,000-strong audience. In this way the ‘big event’ (see below) of the potentially daunting 4½-hour masked Oresteia is broken down, explained, made accessible. Note also how the advert published in The Times, below, plays on the novelty of such a thing as a Greek play being shown on television: ‘If you missed it in 458 BC, catch it this Sunday on Channel 4’.

In between the three acts there were two 10-15 minute interludes: the first was ‘a combination of dance and computer graphics; movements choreographed to computer overlay and to the specially composed music of David Cunningham which, in turn, was inspired by the music of the Oresteia’; the second comprised the jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill’s musical improvisations, which were also inspired by Birtwistle’s score (Channel Four Television: Press Information, 8-14 October 1983).

This plethora of associated, supportive programming around the Oresteia very much reminds me of a 3¾-hour production of the same trilogy broadcast on BBC Radio’s Third Programme in 1956 which had been accompanied by a substantial series of culturally educative programmes. In addition to a prefatory talk by the translator of the plays, the production was followed in subsequent weeks by lectures on the interpretation of the trilogy in terms of theology and morality by the classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones and a programme in which Elsa Vergi of the Greek National Theatre read extracts from the trilogy in Greek interspersed with summaries in English. It was not unusual for the BBC, especially on radio, to accompany ‘highbrow’ cultural broadcasts with explanatory programming, and early Channel 4 was clearly, in its own way and in televisual form, doing a very similar thing with its Oresteia. 

The young Channel 4

… to provide a distinctive service; to innovate in form and content; to deal with interests and groups not served by commercial television, or perhaps any television; to draw programmes from a wider range of production sources than those which constituted the existing industry. (Michael Kustow, One in Four, p. 10)

In October 1983 Channel 4 was, of course, in its infancy. The new network, launched on 2 November 1982, had chosen to focus its arts resources on actual performance – ‘the big event’ – in deliberate contrast with the long-running arts and culture series Arena and Omnibus on the BBC from 1975 and 1967 respectively and The South Bank Show on ITV from 1978 (Jeremy Isaacs, Storm over 4, pp. 168-69: see below for the full bibliographical references). ‘We attached a high priority to the arts’, recalls Jeremy Isaacs, the founding Chief Executive of the network to 1987: ‘we couldn’t help but be distinctive in doing so, since no one else did’ (Look Me in the Eye, p. 359).

The channel’s arts output began with a television version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s theatre production of Nicholas Nickleby, included Bill Bryden’s The Mysteries for the National and Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, and encompassed regular Sunday afternoon opera. Many of these projects were commissioned by Michael Kustow, Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor for the Arts, who had previously worked at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Kustow recalls that he sought ‘not television about the arts, but art television’ (‘Prime-time piffle: 25 years of Channel 4′, The Independent, 5 September 2007). His goals were, on the one hand, to ‘keep alive heightened expression, poetry in speech and classic form’ and, on the other, for these works to be seen by new audiences:

Reaching half a million people, a derisory number in television rating terms but three times the number that saw the Oresteia at the Olivier Theatre, means that some of those viewers are plunged into a classic for the first time. And if there’s a marriage between the visual language and performance style of the theatre work and the codes of television, those viewers may stay tuned. And if you back the thing up with informative documentary and print, as we did with the Oresteia and The Mysteries, you may have opened new interests and appetites people didn’t know they possessed. Because they are cumulative over the years, these things are difficult to measure on television’s ‘appreciation index’. (Michael Kustow, One in Four, pp. 17-18)

The television production

It is a production that has been much admired, and almost as strongly disliked and derogated. (Oliver Taplin, ‘The Harrison Version’, p. 235)

In his essay, the classical scholar Oliver Taplin, who was involved in the production (and the documentary: see above), talks about how this theatre production made a rare attempt to reflect the importance of music, rhythm and tone in the play’s ancient performance with its achievement of an energetic dynamic between Tony Harrison’s words and Harrison Birtwistle’s music. He discusses how the stage production excelled in its ‘momentum, pace, dynamic, rhythm — a constant sense of dramatic urgency and forward movement’, focusing on the example of how the production made the non-naturalist Greek dramatic convention of stichomythia (passages of rapid-fire single line dialogue between two speakers), underscored by rhyme and Birtwistle’s score, a particularly potent feature (ibid., p. 235-237).

To what extent did such characteristic aspects of this powerful production successfully translate to the television medium and how did the selective eye of the camera enhance or detract from them?

The performance for television was filmed in the Olivier Theatre; or, rather, three full performances were captured on four cameras, resulting in twelve full-length recordings which Peter Hall took a very long time to edit. The resulting programme was broadcast on Channel 4 and also made available for purchase from an American educational supplier on three (incredibly expensive) VHS tapes, suggesting that they were considered to have an educational utility alongside their landmark theatrical status. A search of www.worldcat.org confirms that many academic libraries in the UK and across North America still hold this title on their shelves, nearly thirty years after it was originally broadcast.

The television version (which, along with the documentary, is accessible in the RNT Archive) opens with the caption ‘The Oresteia Trilogy by Aeschylus’ followed by the names of the translator, designer, composer and director shown in white letters against a slow panning shot, from below, across the seated audience who are waiting for the performance. Viewers who watched the previous evening’s documentary heard that the Olivier had actually been modelled on the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, and so the perspective and subject of this shot is designed to underline the correspondence between Epidaurus and the Olivier, whilst the panning shot, from below, of the seated, chattering audience mirrors a similar shot of the Epidaurus audience shown in the documentary (the significant difference being, of course, that the open-air performance began in the light of early evening, whilst the television version is shot inside a closed performance space, darkly lit).

The camera abruptly switches perspective: we are now high up, looking down past the rows of audience either side of the stairs towards the stage which is in total darkness apart from the light on one tiny figure, situated high up — the Watchman (just visible in the adjacent image). The caption ‘Part I. Agamemnon’ appears quickly and fades, the lights dim, and we move to a close-up of the Watchman — a perspective which, of course, would not have been possible for the theatre audience. His opening speech is captivating, funny in places, and given in David Roper’s strong Bradford accent. He appears to be speaking directly to camera, with striking and good use of gesture and head movement, making for an arresting start to the production.

On the Watchman’s exit, Birtwistle’s score accompanies the parodos, the traditional entry of the chorus onto the set. Here we get for the first time a rare glimpse of the full extent of the set, which with its large circular playing space and raised playing space at the back of the stage echoes elements of ancient theatres. The chorus break into their ode, their rhythmically delivered lines punctuated throughout by the percussive elements of the score. The camera shots, too, often take their cue from the line breaks in Harrison’s text, sometimes making for a rapid succession of similar shots which, although they keep pace with the lines and music, are not – for this viewer – sufficiently differentiated to be worthwhile and engaging.

Close-ups of the members of the Chorus sometimes show glimpses of lips moving through the mask’s mouthpiece and torsos inflating with the breath required to keep up with the energetic script which is chanted and sung at points. Despite these small signs of life beneath the near-identical masks and extremely similar costumes (in shades of grey and brown), the continuing focus on the gently moving figures and immobile mask-faces lends a very static character to this opening choral ode. Some shots of the audience or the whole stage would have helped to open things up a bit; a little more movement would have helped even more. It is also apparent that the use of such a rapid sequence of shots, selected from the films of the four variously located cameras, also lends a sense of slight dislocation, as the chorus seem to look in a number of different directions from line to line.

Enter Clytemnestra, and the chorus scatter as the palace doors open and she walks forward. The actor Philip Donaghy’s evidently male body and voice in a feminine dress, walk and stance effectively captures the way in which Aeschylus portrays Clytemnestra as a women with some masculine qualities. (This is rendered by Harrison in the translation as ‘That woman’s a man the way she gets moving’ and ‘You feel like a woman but talk like a man talks’.)

Shortly, things liven up even more with the swift entrance of Agamemnon on his chariot, followed by Cassandra in a cage. When they swing round the circular playing space the camera moves back and we see the shape of the stage and the lights above, and these indisputable signs that we are in a theatre strangely inject some welcome energy into the production.

The scene between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, in which she cleverly persuades him, despite his gut instinct otherwise, to walk into the palace on a fine purple cloth which is good enough to honour the gods with (and which, as such, a man should refrain from treading on) is powerfully played. As the two actors engage in the passage of stichomythia at the climax of their discussion, the camera and score work beautifully together to punctuate the shifts from one shot to another. As Agamemnon moves slowly towards the doors of the palace – where he will meet his death at his wife’s hands – the camera moves back and forth between close-ups of his bare feet on the cloth, the watching Chorus, and Clytemnestra. The effect is reminiscent of the eyes of a fully engaged audience member darting back and forth between the different performance elements on stage – but in a more formal and stylised way, choreographed by the regularity of Birtwistle’s percussive music.

At several other points do the cameras’ various close-ups of the immobile mask, the text of the play and the score work in real harmony. When Agamemnon and Cassandra are in the palace being murdered, the camera moves from mask to mask amongst the Chorus. As they utter the following lines, their immobility and the lack of accompanying gesture or movement underscores the fixed nature of the Chorus in the orchestra, the circular playing space (because Greek tragic convention dictates that they do not enter the stage building, and indeed they rarely take any actual action), and at this point it works particularly well to emphasize their sense of fear and impotence in the face of the murders Clytemnestra is enacting within the palace.

I fear that those screams mean that our clanchief’s slain
Now we should take counsel
And every man should say what he thinks is the safest plan.

In my opinion we ought to bring
The whole city here to help the king.

And I say rush in, break down the door
Catch them with swords still dripping with gore.

In addition to the Chorus’ static poses and immobile heads here, a pause of a couple of seconds follows on from the line ‘And every man should say what he thinks is the safest plan’: in other words, no-one knows or wants to say what ought to happen next. They are utterly frozen.

The outcome of those murders – the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra – are, again, according to ancient convention, wheeled out through the palace doors on a low platform (the ekkyklema in Greek) for the Chorus, and the audience, to see. The camera here enables us to look upon the corpses, entangled in a net like fish, more closely than the theatregoer, as it had with Agamemnon’s feet treading on the red tapestry on his way into the palace. This makes for a fabulous tableau, with Agamemnon’s left forearm erect, and the lifeless Cassandra lying between his legs (see adjacent image). There are definitely sexual elements to this scene, particularly Clytemnestra’s ecstatic rendition of the lines:

He lay there gasping and splurting his blood out
Spraying me with dark blood-dew, dew I delight in
As much as the graincrop in the fresh gloss of rainfall
When the wheatbud’s in labour and swells into birthpang.

She gets angry, condemning her husband as ‘Shagamemnon, shameless, shaft-happy, ogler and grinder of Troy’s golden girlhood’, ramming home the sense of betrayal she feels at his bringing home as concubine Cassandra, on top of the greater loss of their daughter Iphigenia, whom he sacrificed to gets favourable winds for the sea journey from Greece to Troy. In this scene, the fixed camera shot, with occasional close-ups, works well. There is nowhere else one would wish to look in this scene.

Critical reception

Critical opinion of the television production was polarised. John Naughton, writing in The Listener, considered that ‘although one could guess at the theatrical impact of the stage production, it didn’t work on the box. It was like looking at great events through a keyhole, or the wrong end of a telescope: interesting, but distant’. Lynne Truss of The Times Educational Supplement was similarly disappointed: ‘it is a pity that, as the production was filmed during public performances, there is not more sense of it as a theatrical event. There are few shots of the whole stage (so the groupings of the chorus are sometimes missed), there are no shots of the musicians, and, saddest of all, there is no applause at the end. In the Epidaurus programme, the enthusiastic reception is thrilling’. Robin Buss, also of the TES, had a more general criticism: ‘if C4 wants to commit hara-kiri, this is a safe, even a noble way to do it. Culture is not popular, but it is non-controversial and everyone knows that is a good thing. C4 appears to have decided that, if it has to go, its suicide note will take the form of a pious condemnation of our philistine disregard for Greek drama’.

Those who were left deeply impressed by the production often had praise for the technical aspects of the production. Note how some of the same points arose for those who liked it and those who did not so much. Michael Wood, writing in New Society, considered that:

rather than simply being recorded for/by television it has been genuinely translated, given a new and different life by fluent photography and fast, imaginative editing. We rarely see the whole stage, for example. The camera moves from face to face (from mask to mask), waiting only the length of a line or a cadence, picking up groupings of the chorus, now one, now two, now five heads, framing two protagonists as they quarrel, cutting to silent characters for their gestures of reaction, putting Agamemnon’s foot in a giant close-up as he steps on the purple cloth which will lead him to his murder. Apparently four cameras were set up in different spots for three full performances, leaving Hall with 48 hours of film to edit. The result is not only that television sees the plays for us, chooses emphases not available to a theatre audience, but that something like a musical dimension is added. […] Everything in Hall’s production – words used, rhythms of speech, stylised gestures, unmoving masks, pauses, silences – helps us to see not what these characters feel but what their tactical and formal position is: the father-murdering mother faces the mother-slaying son.

The freedom that Peter Hall gave the cameraman impressed some critics including Alix Coleman in the TV Times – who reports Hall as saying, ‘There was no shooting script. I’d say, shoot what interests you. You’re free. They were fascinated and had a great deal of fun” ’ – and Julian Barnes in The Observer. Barnes goes on to write that ‘The masks (no longer dampening the actors’ delivery, as in the theatre) were a great success: the camera prowled from one to another, shifting the angle of vision, cutting away suddenly, and giving these formal disguises an immediacy and flexibility beyond that available to the static viewer in the stalls’.

Suzie Mackenzie’s write-up in Time Out, 6 October 1983, offers perhaps the most balanced assessment of all:

this epic rendering […] adds as much as it loses to the original experience. It is still Harrison’s verse that carries you through and the masks still possess that eerie quality of actually transmitting emotions to the audience. But most obviously the sweeping mise en scene of Peter Hall’s original production is replaced by an attention to nuance that is impossible without the focus of a camera and editing. Prepare yourself for a marathon and submit to the natural pull of television. This is one occasion when the concentrated intimacy of the box is a real plus.

Bibliographical references

Julian Barnes, ‘Delving into Dr Newman’s Casebook’, The Observer, 16 October 1983.
Robin Buss, ‘The Gadfly Grows Wary’, The Times Educational Supplement, 4 November 1983, p. 20.
Alix Coleman, ‘Happy Tale of a Greek Tragedy’, TV Times, 8 October 1983, pp. 76-78.
Peter Hall, Exposed by the Mask: Form and Language in Drama. London: Oberon, 2003.
Jeremy Isaacs, Storm over 4: A Personal Account. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
— Look Me in the Eye: A Life on Television. London: Abacus, 2006.
Michael Kustow, One in Four: A Year in the Life of a Channel Four Commissioning Editor. London: Chatto & Windus, 1987.
— ‘Prime-time piffle: 25 years of Channel 4′, The Independent, 5 September 2007.
John Naughton, ‘Television: Crescendos in the Living-Room’, The Listener, 13 October 1983.
Oliver Taplin, ‘The Harrison Version: “So long ago that it’s become a song?” ’, in Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin (eds.), Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004, pp. 235-251. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lynne Truss, ‘Masked Celebration’, Times Educational Supplement, 7 October 1983.
Michael Wood, ‘Family at War’, New Society, 6 October 1983, p. 19.

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Gavin Clarke of the RNT Archive, Justin Smith and Ieuan Franklin of the Channel 4 and British Film Culture research project at the University of Portsmouth, and Graham Nelson of St Anne’s College, Oxford for generous help with research materials.

Radio Times' 'Television' cover, 23 October 1936

Although most of our recent blog posts have been about particular productions of stage plays on television, and although these contributions will most definitely continue, we also want to use the blog to reflect on the ways in which we are conducting our research. This post comes from my recognition this week that the central source from which Amanda and I are working, the weekly BBC publication Radio Times, is perhaps not quite as reliable, especially in the earliest years of television, as we might once have thought.

Surprisingly perhaps, for almost all of television’s history, there is no official retrospective record, either public or private, of what was actually broadcast. For whatever reason, for many years after 1938 the BBC did not log exactly which programmes were transmitted. (Such data is, of course, collected about today’s services, but I would be fascinated to know at what date such records began.)

Given the absence of any central record, Radio Times is of absolutely fundamental importance to historians, archivists and all those concerned with television’s past. The BBC is currently digitising back copies, and information drawn from this important project will become the definitive record. But as our Screen Plays research is uncovering, we need to treat the content of Radio Times with care.

For just one short period of television’s history, if we want to know about the content of transmissions on a daily basis there is an authoritative alternative. Published by the BBC, the carefully compiled volumes of the BBC Programme Records from 1922 onwards record titles and timings, contributors and credits for each and every radio programme. The hardbound BBC Programme Records 1936 extends this account and includes details of television programmes for the fragment of the year after the start of the official service. Then for the following two years the BBC Television Programme Records, Vol. 1, 1937-38 was published as a standalone volume (and is abbreviated with the 1936 information to Records in the discussion below).

Publication of this invaluable series was disrupted by the war. No volume for either radio or television covers 1939, and presumably the compilation of records was not seen as a priority either for the wartime radio services or for the cash-strapped television operation when it resumed in 1946. The neat row of well-thumbed volumes on the shelves of the BBC Written Archives Centre comes to an end with 1938. Even so, for television historians the 1936 to 1938 records are absolutely invaluable.

In many ways the Records listings are more detailed than those in Radio Times, which were sent to the printers up to a fortnight before a programme was broadcast. There are, for example, entries for each edition of the popular magazine show Picture Page with careful notes of which music hall acts and noted figures of the moment appeared on screen. There is also, on occasion, far more detailed casting information, as can be seen from comparing the listings in each source for a remarkable presentation one Friday afternoon of the Habima Theatre from Tel-Aviv. In addition to the presence of the legendary Jewish actress Hana Rovina (this appears to be the more usual spelling), we learn the names of twenty-two other actors who appeared with her. In addition, we can see that there was a commentary by the biblical scholar J. Isaacs and an introduction by Sydney Bernstein, who was then Chairman of Granada, a property and cinemas  conglomerate and who was known for his interest in the theatre and who was later to found Granada Television.

Because the Records were compiled after transmission of a television programme, we can safely assume that they are more accurate than the speculative information in Radio Times. And it is when programme entries are compared directly, that the problems become clear for researchers who are relying on Radio Times.

Very often the information in the Records and Radio Times aligns fairly precisely, although the exact transmission times in the former rarely agrees exactly with the schedulers’ aspirations. But there are a number of occasions in the 1937 records (which to date are the only ones that I have looked at closely) when significant scheduling changes were made after Radio Times had gone to press.

For Saturday 27 February 1937, Radio Times promised its readers, as part of a double bill called Grave and Gay, the comedy sketch by Ronald Jeans Catching the Male (Radio Times Television Supplement, 19 February 1937, p. 10). In fact, what viewers saw was Catherine Parr, a comedy sketch by Maurice Baring (Records, 1937, p. 16).  An edition of Theatre Parade, albeit with an unspecified play, was promised for 22 April 1937 in Radio Times but – according to the Records – was not produced. The short comedy sketch The ‘Ole in the Road, scheduled for 4 May 1937, was replaced by one called In the Night Watch.

Radio Times announced a major production of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s play Waterloo for 8 October 1937, but according to the Records this only made it to the screen on 25 October, with a repeat two days later. And on 25 October it replaced what Radio Times had billed as a presentation of scenes from Measure for Measure. One other notable difference concerns what might have been the first Eugene O’Neill drama to be featured on British television. Act II of O’Neill’s Anna Christie was billed in Radio Times for 3.40pm on Friday 7 May 1937. This was to be a staging in the studio of part of the Westminster Theatre production with Flora Robson as Anna Christopherson. In the Records there is no sign of the transmission, either then or later, with its place in the schedule on 7 May taken by an edition of Play Parade with scenes from Twelfth Night.

In 1937 BBC Television presented around eighty productions of theatre plays, and the information in Radio Times for approximately ten per cent of these appears to be  wrong in some significant way. Which seventy-five years on perhaps only matters if you are depending on Radio Times as your primary source to compile an accurate database of all productions of stage plays on British television.

The problem, I imagine, is most acute for these early years. The pre-war television service from Alexandra Palace was run on a wing and prayer, and often scrambled together at the last moment. I can imagine the logistical and contractual problems that were being worked on at the last moment to bring Anna Christie to Alexandra Palace, and why the prospect had to be abandoned, even if Radio Times had gone to press. After 1946 the planning systems were more rigorous. Changes to the programme schedule were more likely to occur in these years because of technical problems rather than down-to-the-wire changes of plan.

It is also hard to know what alternatives researchers have. The BBC Written Archives Centre holds written records for many of the programmes, but far from all, and rarely for those that did not reach the screen – I have yet to find a file for the abandoned Anna Christie. There are also scattered press reviews for a handful of productions, but information about the contents of these early schedules is otherwise scarce if not non-existent. If only the Records had continued publication beyond 1938… As it is, we have to continue to recognise the immense value of Radio Times, and to rely upon it, but also to acknowledge that, as with everything else in the historical record, its tens of thousands of pages have to be used with caution, to be constantly questioned and, where possible, carefully cross-checked.

The three-year AHRC-funded Screen Plays research project is concerned with all plays written for the theatre that have been produced for British television since 1930. The project documents and develops new critical approaches to the television presentation of these plays, seeking to understand the institutional, production, technological and aesthetic contexts for these adaptations within both broadcasting and British theatre. More can be read about the project’s aims and activities elsewhere on this blog.

For the conference, proposals are invited for papers and panels tackling issues and topics within the broad area of theatre plays on British television from 1930 to the present. In order to encourage a truly interdisciplinary discussion we warmly welcome proposals from scholars and postgraduate students working on the histories of broadcasting, media, drama, theatre and culture.

Possible topics for examination and exploration include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The forms and screen languages of British television presentations of theatre plays.
• Studies of particular genres, plays or playwrights across time.
• The changing social and cultural meanings of theatre on television and the ways in which these were regarded and exploited by broadcasters in particular historical circumstances.
• The extensive commercial and cultural relationships between the theatre, individual companies and television.
• The movement of practitioners between the spheres of theatre and television.
• The institutional, production, technological and aesthetic contexts of these adaptations within both broadcasting and British theatre.
• Audience and reception studies into how viewers engaged with these productions.
• The evolution of what may be regarded as the ‘normative’ style of studio drama, and the development of new forms within and beyond the studio.
• The post-1980s decline of theatre on British television and the recent revival of interest in its possibilities in the multi-platform age.

Proposals in the form of a 250-word abstract and brief biography (or 200-word panel outline, with accompanying individual abstracts and brief biographies), should be submitted to both John Wyver (john@illuminationsmedia.co.uk) and Dr Amanda Wrigley (a.wrigley@westminster.ac.uk) by 29 February 2012. It is intended that the conference will give rise to an edited collection of essays on theatre plays on British television.

Cinderella from Spike Hughes, 1938

As he was planning his end-of-the-year schedule in September 1948, head of television programmes Cecil McGivern sent a note to senior colleagues seeking their opinion of what he described as ‘Cinderella, a pantomime specially written for television by Spike Hughes’ (memo from McGivern, 30 September 1948, WAC T5/96R). He had been prompted to consider this by a personal letter from Hughes to McGivern’s boss, controller of television Norman Collins. Hughes had enquired about the possibility of a revival of ‘my little opera, Cinderella, which we performed on television a couple of times at Christmas 1938′. As he explained further,

The cast is not enormous [...] but most important the scenery is all built. Indeed, I think it is in daily use at Alexandra Palace, for I believe I recognised some of it when I was up there in January – being used to show off Geraldo’s profile. (Letter from Patrick Hughes, known as ‘Spike’, to Norman Collins, 9 August 1938)

Patrick Hughes, who used ‘Spike’ as a professional name, is an intriguing figure who distinguished himself as a jazz musician in the early 1930s (there is a detailed discussion of his recordings by John Wright here) and later as a respected writer and broadcaster about classical music. During the 1960s and ’70s, he hosted Southern Television’s occasional opera broadcasts from Glyndebourne.

Cinderella was given at the start of 1938 on BBC radio, after which producer Dallas Bower – who acknowledged being ‘a close personal friend of the composer’ – sought to produce it for television (memo from Dallas Bower to Tel. Ex, 10 November 1938). Bower had a reputation for experimentation at Alexandra Palace and he set out to make Cinderella highly stylised and distinctive. For a short work to be shown first in an afternoon slot of 13 December (and then repeated eight days later), the production was also comparatively complex, requiring both studios at Alexandra Palace as well as film inserts. The role of Cinderella herself was sung by soprano Gwen Catley, then at the start of a successful career. In addition to the singers, there was also a ballet component with eight dancers, one of whom was the celebrated choreographer Antony Tudor.

Radio Times listing, 13 December 1938

When Cecil McGivern sought out memories of this production a decade on, there was no great enthusiasm for returning to the piece. Head of television design Peter Bax (who had overseen the settings in 1938) wrote that ‘in general I thought it rather precious and lacking in humour’ (memo, 30 September 1948). Music organiser James Hartley, however, recalled that ‘most people thought it a clever and attractive piece of work’ (memo, 30 September 1948). Executive Philip Bate contributed the most interesting reflection, which suggests how television’s sense of itself – and of its audience – had changed from ten years before:

… it was a sophisticated, rather brittle production, the sort of thing which was more easily accepted by the rather limited viewing public at that period rather than our present one. There is not a very great deal of paper about it in the files, but I pick out one significant line. Dallas Bower, the Producer, asked that the dressing should be in the style of Ludwig Mayer’s UFA film of Cinderella made in 1925. (Memo Philip Bate to H. Tel. P., 7 October 1948)

Four days later, having collated these responses, Cecil McGivern penned a one line memo: ‘I feel it is not for our present audience.’ (Memo from Cecil McGivern to Norman Collins, 11 October 1948) Collins was left with the task of conveying the news to the composer, which he did with a certain economy of truth:

… having consulted with all the old guard of producers and heads of departments who were connected with pre-war Television, and therefore knew your Cinderella and liked it, I am going to be a disappointment to you. The trouble is simply that the studios this Christmas will be packed to bursting point and I daren’t add another costume piece of any kind whatsoever. (Letter from Norman Collins to Patrick Hughes, 13 October 1948)

Cinderella from Alexandra Palace, 1948

One of the productions which by mid-October 1938 was packed into the schedule of the Alexandra Palace studios was an ambitious original production of Cinderella as a pantomime. There is comparatively little documentation of the background to this presentation, but its scale (together with traces of some of the fall-out which are preserved in the files) indicates the increasing confidence of the television service more than two years after it had started again after the war. Such was the budget, indeed (£2,785 was allocated), that two repeat transmissions were considered, although in the event the live production (of which no recording exists) was presented only on 27 December 1948 and 4 January 1949.

The cast of thirty (including eight extras) was led by the popular comic actor Jack Hulbert (as Buttons), who also co-produced with BBC producer Walton Anderson. Eric Robinson led a sixteen-piece orchestra, backing eighteen members of the George Mitchell Choir. There were also comparatively elaborate film inserts, with interiors shot at Lancaster House (whose administrators were concerned that the building should not be recognisable) and additional filming at Westminster Ice Rink and in Hatfield.

Such notices as are recoverable suggest that this Cinderella met with a mixed reception. I can find no substantial review of the pantomime, although in a round-up of seasonal stage offerings for The Manchester Guardian, Ivor Brown wrote that television ‘gave us the affable, elongated page-boy of Jack Hulbert in a version which nicely used film to show Cinders’ coach careering across the country’ (‘Buttons and beaux’, 2 January 1949, p. 2). In The Listener, Harold Hobson also congratulated Hulbert for his ‘successful endeavour[...] over the Christmas holidays to lighten what Stevenson so oddly termed the “great task of happiness”.’ (‘Critic on the hearth: television’, 6 January 1949, p. 34)

There is just a trace, albeit expressed rather obliquely, of what some of the audience thought in a memo – which also includes his own response – from superintendant engineer television D. C. Birkinshaw to controller of television Norman Collins:

Thank you for sending me the correspondence about Cinderella. Certainly viewers are nothing if not candid. [...] I found the book weak as if it had been done by the writer when he was tired and, as a consequence, not able to generate many interesting ideas. ‘Cinderella’ I thought insufficiently attractive for the part and the selection of music left much to be desired. [...] On the other side, however, there was some pleasant spectacle and if I may praise my own people for a moment, I thought it was an example of first-class lighting. (Memo from D. C. Birkinshaw to C. Tel., 10 January 1949)

Cinderella from Lime Grove, 1950

Co-producers Jack Hulbert and Walton Anderson returned to Cinderella two years later. An original script (‘the book’) was written this time by Gordon Crier and Sally Ann Howes played Cinders. The pantomime horse appeared in the by-now familiar guise of the television favourite Muffin the Mule – no copyright fee was payable for this, but a verbal credit to the creators of Muffin was given in the programme. Most drama production had by this time transferred to the studios at Lime Grove, and live performances were scheduled for 26 December 1950 and 1 January 1951. Budget cuts, however, were a fact of life even then, and only £2,250 was allocated for this production, £585 less than the previous year. Even before what is referred to one memo as ‘the unfortunate accident’ it was clear that the budget was insufficient (memo from Ronald Waldman, 22 December 1950).

On 18 December 1950, The Manchester Guardian on page 5 carried this short news item:

CINDERELLA’S PONIES RUN AWAY

Six Shetland ponies pulling a coach carrying ‘Cinderella’ – the actress Sally Ann Howes – bolted yesterday at Hatfield, Hertfordshire while being filmed [...] Miss Howes was unhurt but the coachman, James Holt (73), of Greys, Essex, was taken to hospital.

The BBC’s programme file on these post-war Cinderellas fails to record the fate of Mr. Holt but we must hope that he made a full recovery. This was the last of the four Cinderellas from the BBC during the six years of post-war Labour government, which would be voted out of office in October 1951. A fairy-tale ending was just around the corner with a consumer boom and years that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, in a speech on 20 July 1957, could describe as a time when ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.