Visions of electric media: television in the Victorian and machine ages

Book review of 'Visions of electric media: television in the Victorian and machine ages', by Ivy Roberts, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2019, 286 pp., ISBN: 978 94 6298 659

Exploring the lost television and technique of Fred O'Donovan

In the history of British television drama few notable creative figures are as forgotten as the actor, film director and pioneer producer Fred O’Donovan. After a distinguished career at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, after directing Ireland’s first feature film, and after nearly two decades’ work on the London stage, O’Donovan joined BBC Television in early 1938. As one of the first directors of studio drama he earned a ‘Produced by’ credit on more than 60 broadcasts. These included plays by the major Irish writers J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey as well as dramas by Eugene O’Neill, Chekhov and Molière. Along with other television drama producers at that time, including Dallas Bower and Stephen Harrison, O’Donovan was a key agent in the fledgling form’s development. With his background in theatre and the cinema he also exemplified the medium’s intermedial engagement with the stage and other media of the day. According to his contemporaries he also worked with a highly distinctive studio style involving lengthy shots without cuts that was known as the ‘one camera technique’. But to date no moving image trace has been discovered of what at the time was a celebrated body of work. In part because of this lack of recordings, and despite both his centrality to early television drama and the ‘one camera technique’ representing a significant aesthetic alternative for studio drama, Fred O’Donovan has received little attention in the literature on early television. Drawing on a range of written sources, and in particular the records of the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC), this article begins the process of recovering O’Donovan’s work by offering a critical introduction to his career, an exploration of the production context in which he was operating, and a consideration of the significance of his ‘one-camera technique’ and its resonances in moving image culture since his death

Book Review: Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939

A review of 'Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939' by Doron Galili, published by Duke University Press, 202

Scenes from Cymbeline and the language of the early television studio

Broadcasts of scenes from Cymbeline in 1937 and 1956 were among the earliest British television productions of Shakespeare. On both occasions the selections included the ‘wooing scene’ (Act I Scene 6) and the ‘trunk scene’ (Act II Scene 2). Transmitted with multiple electronic cameras from a television studio, the excerpts were taken from contemporary theatrical productions, in 1937 from Andre van Gyseghem’s staging at the Embassy Theatre, London, and in 1956 from the production by Michael Benthall at the Old Vic. Neither broadcast was recorded, but for both of these ‘lost’ productions the BBC archives preserve detailed camera scripts and other documentation. Uniquely for Shakespeare on British television, these scripts detail pre-war and post-war treatments of the same elements from a play by studio directors (respectively, Royston Morley and Michael Elliott) nearly twenty years apart. An additional comparison is facilitated by the extant studio production of Cymbeline in 1983, directed by Elijah Moshinsky for The BBC Television Shakespeare. Grounded in a close reading of the 1937 and 1956 camera scripts as well as the 1983 recording and camera script, this paper offers a detailed analysis of the development of the language of television studio drama as applied to the two scenes from Cymbeline. Shot lengths, camera movements and framings – all of which are significantly more complex in the 1956 script - are explored as determinants of the multiple available meanings of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry. The analysis is further contextualised with discussions of developing studio technology and the changing institutional context of BBC television drama as well as the history of Cymbeline in British theatre in the twentieth century

An Intimate and Intermedial Form: Early Television Shakespeare from the BBC, 1937-39

Between February 1937 and April 1939 the fledgling BBC television service from Alexandra Palace broadcast more than twenty Shakespeare adaptations. Although no recordings exist of these transmissions, this chapter explores their surviving written traces. The article also outlines the production environment, cultural context and intermedial connections of interwar television Shakespeare

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance and the politics of possibility in two television adaptations

John Arden’s stage play Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance was adapted for British television in a Granada Television production in 1961 and four years later in a three-part BBC Schools version. Although received at its stage premiere in 1959 with puzzlement the play has since been acknowledged as a key work of modern political drama in Britain with its bold use of anti-naturalistic techniques including heightened prose and the integration of ballads. This article explores the politics of the play and considers the ways in which these were retained or removed by the two processes of adaptation for television

Bert Hardy: Exercises with Photography and Film

The two short films and essay published here come out of a collaborative research project on the aesthetic and historical qualities of Bert Hardy’s wartime and post-war photography for Picture Post. Developing the methodologies being explored in the field of videographic criticism, we use moving images to produce a visual exploration of the material and formal qualities of Bert Hardy’s photographs in the 1940s. Digital moving images and sound, we suggest, expand our potential understanding and analysis of Hardy’s work, in ways in which traditional written modes of criticism cannot. We use the poetic and expressive possibilities of our medium to highlight and examine those material qualities, along with the historical atmosphere of post-war visual media. The two films each explore a particular Hardy photo-story: Fire-Fighters! focuses on the themes of grain in the printed image, the facial close-up as an affective form of national expression, narrative sequence, and the move in the story from figuration to abstraction. The second film, Life in the Elephant develops the concept of narrative and photographic sequence and facial/emotional expression. It also considers the ways in which the photo-story expresses a sense of historical place. The accompanying article develops the historical contexts for the two photo-stories, the theoretical ideas motivating the project, and the technical processes and collaborative partnerships involved in making the films

The filmic fugue of Ken Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel

First broadcast as an episode of BBC Television’s Monitor in 1962, Ken Russell’s documentary film Pop Goes the Easel profiles four young artists: Pauline Boty, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Peter Blake. With an exuberant and richly varied approach to filming, Pop Goes the Easel is a rich and revealing document of early Pop Art in London. This article situates the film within the context of television’s engagement with the visual arts in the medium’s first 25 years. It is argued that part of its significance within the tradition of the visual arts on television is its resistance to the determinations of an explanatory voice. Also, that its achievement combines and develops approaches of photojournalism, documentary and art cinema from the mid- and late 1950s. It is further proposed that Pop Goes the Easel is especially note-worthy for its finely-balanced tensions between discourses traditionally understood as oppositional: the stasis of artworks versus the linear narrative of film; the indexical qualities of documentary versus the inventions of fiction; the mass-produced elements and images of popular culture versus the individual authorship and authority of high art; the abstracted rationality of critical discourse versus explosions of embodied sensuality; and the determinations and closure of a singular meaning versus polysemous openness

Breaking the generic mould? Grayson Perry, Channel 4 and the production of British arts television

© 2018, © The Author(s) 2018. This article examines Channel 4’s critically acclaimed series, Grayson Perry: Who Are You? (2014). Using interviews with those involved in making the series and textual analysis, we argue that the elements that contributed to the success of the series are inherently difficult to replicate due to the political economy of contemporary television production, thereby threatening the sustainability of the genre. However, while arts television rarely constitutes a commercial success in a traditional ratings sense, we outline the strategic value of the genre in contributing to Channel 4’s identity as Britain’s alternative public service broadcaster