Organised with the support of The British Academy, this two-day gathering focuses on television before the Second World War in Britain, continental Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union. With presentations, panels and screenings of rare archival material, the event marks the centenary of the first British public presentation of what John Logie Baird called “true television”, which took place in London in early 1926.

The conference brings together scholars and archivists from Britain, Europe and North America to explore imaginings and understandings of early television, and its productions and people, rather than its technologies, which has been the dominant construction of this history to date.

One central focus will be early television’s intermedial entanglements with the radio, cinema, theatre, dance and visual arts of the first half of the twentieth century. Parallel to this will be a concern to develop a transnational dialogue for a field that has largely developed along national lines.

The conference should be of interest not only to media historians, but also to those concerned with mid-century culture more broadly, to social historians, and to those with a general interest in the development of television.

Registration is free, and there are still some places available; go to the Eventbrite page to sign-up as an ‘external guest’.

Thursday 2 July

• 9.00 Registration; coffee and tea
• 9.30 Welcome
• Catherine Dormor, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Head of College of Creative Arts and Technologies, University of Westminster
• 9.35 Introduction
• John Wyver

• 9.45 Opening Keynote
• André Lange, editor, Histoire de la television website: ‘The promised ubiquity  – revisiting the formative years of television, 1877-1926’
• 10.45 Coffee and tea

• 11.00 Panel: Beginnings
• Doron Galili, Stockholm: ‘Pulp vision: popular genre fiction and televisual fantasies’
• Donald McLean: ‘Looking back at Looking In: the evidence that increased awareness of BBC productions in the low-definition era’
• John Wyver, Westminster: ’30-line broadcasts in Britain, 1928-1935: a television of attractions?’

• 12.30 Welcome
• Peter Bonfield, Vice-Chancellor, University of Westminster
• 12.40 Screening: BBC Television Demonstration Film, with introduction by Lisa Kerrigan, BFI
• 1.30 Lunch (not provided)

• 2.15 Panel: People of pre-war British television
• Jamie Medhurst, Aberystwyth: ‘Eustace Robb, a pioneering producer’
• Kate Murphy, Bournemouth: ‘Business as usual? Women’s work in pre-war BBC Television’
• 3.15 Coffee and tea

• 3.30 Panel: Early televisions in the United States
• William Boddy, Baruch College: ‘Interrogating the interregnum:  Media historiography and 1930s American television’
• Paul Marshall: ‘The television of Ulises Armand Sanabria’
• Mark J. Williams, Dartmouth College: ‘Los Angeles: The “local” exception to early television historiography’
• Ron Simon, The Paley Center for Media, via video link: ‘The 1939 launch of American television’
• 5.15 Drinks reception

Friday 3 July

• 9.00 Coffee and tea
• 9.30 Traces of early British television
• Simon Vaughan, APTS: ‘BBC Television in the 1930s: a visual history through the lens of Desmond Campbell’
• Dick Fiddy, BFI: ‘Traces of television’s early comedians’
• Stephen Bourne: ‘A sort of magic – Black contributors and creators on pre-war BBC Television’
• 11.00 Coffee and tea

• 11.15 Panel: Early televisions in Europe and the Soviet Union
• Danielle Simon, Middlebury: ‘Early television and Fascist spectacle at the 1939 Villaggio Balneare ’
• Oliver Botar, Manitoba: ‘Moholy-Nagy: The Telehor (Television) as the transmitter of abstract “Light Plays”’
• Jeffrey Cohen: ‘Television before the network: performance and spectacle in early Soviet broadcasting, 1931–1941’
• Angelina Lucento, Duke University: ‘Realism in real time: early Soviet monumental painting as proto-television’
• 1.15 Lunch (not provided)

• 1.45 Screening: Compilation of reports of pre-war television in Europe and USA
• 2.45 Panel: The intermediality of early British television
• Luke McKernan: ‘BBC television news and the newsreels in the 1930s’
• Ian Christie: ‘Dallas Bower – a visionary at Alexandra Palace’
• 3.45 Coffee and tea

• 4.00 Closing keynote
• Anne-Katrin Weber, Lausanne: ‘Surveillance and targeting by CCTV – a transnational perspective on interwar television’s useful forms’
• 5.00-5.30 Plenary discussion

The post The Cultures of Early Television appeared first on Illuminations.

• Television returns: marking the reopening 80 years ago today of the BBC’s Television service from Alexandra Palace on 7 June 1946, Paul Hayes for the History of the BBC website reflects engagingly on the relaunch. This is a story that will also feature in my book about post-war television in Britain, but that is — well, at least four years away.

• From YouTube sensation to A24’s youngest director: a remarkable profile by Kyle Buchanan for The New York Times [gift link] of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, the filmmaker responsible for the smash-hit Backrooms; and related to which I was struck by a Bluesky thread from author Mark Harris, which includes this:

• Why Westerns still matter: I know it’s another article [and gift link] from The New York Times but I’ve been watching a whole bunch of classic Westerns recently, so I particularly appreciated Jason Bailey’s piece on a MoMA retrospective of some great contributions to the genre from Universal Pictures.

• Ozu in colour: a rich Every Frame a Painting video essay, made with TCM, by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos about the late films of Yasujirō Ozu:

• Hannah Höch’s fortuitous beauty: … and staying with MoMA, this is Samantha Friedman’s very fine recent essay about five photomontages made by the artist between 1921 and 1930.

• Why the American novel refused to grow up: Becca Rothfeld for The New Yorker [£; limited free access] ranges across the history of the novel in looking back to Leslie Fiedler’s ground-breaking critical work Love and Death in the American Novel, first published in 1960.

• Art for our sakes: a rather wonderful speech by Zadie Smith reproduced by The New York Review of Books [£; limited free access] in which she discusses, among other things, the writer’s responsibility to her times and The Known World by the great African American author Edward P. Jones; she concludes:

The Known World is not a novel about the invasion of Iraq. It’s a masterpiece about a corrupt system’s corrupting influence on everybody, including its primary victims. It has internal order. It’s beautiful and tragic. It is human, above all.

Reading it reminded me what humans are, what they are capable of, why they do the things they do, and why it is they leave so many things undone. It encouraged me to come here today and speak as I have. Such art is made by us and for us. It is for our sakes. Its power is not of the kind this president recognizes, but it has its own kind of force. It will outlast both him and his regime. It will outlast us all.

• ‘I can gauge John’s reaction: that’s good, stick that in’: Paul McCartney on how old bandmates – and Oasis – inspired his nostalgic new album: Laura Barton speaks with, and for the Guardian writes delightfully about, the 83-year-young musician…

• ‘I knew it was over for us’: the bands who got left behind when punk exploded: … and another recommendation for a music essay from the Guardian – Alexis Petridis’ read of the weekly music papers from 1976 which, he writes, is ‘a plunge into a past with which you feel weirdly unacquainted’ (h/t Billy Smart who wrote to me that,

it reminded my of Taylor Parkes’ useful observation that attentively critically watching old Top Of The Pops hasn’t got much to do with nostalgia as people commonly understand it, but is more like being a military historian.

• The 40 best Tony Awards performances of all time: here’s a hugely enjoyable rabbit hole for the rest of the day — a selection by Time Out USA‘s Adam Feldman of great awards show turns, including Patti LuPone in 2008:

• The ghosts of Antonio Gramsci: for The Nation [£; free access with registrsation], Aditya Bahl responds to Andy Merrifield’s Roses for Gramsci, which looks as if it is an essential read.

• The flow of time is ours to disrupt: not in any sense the easiest read, but I found this short essay productive – for iai news, philosopher Timotheus Vermeulen draws on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, along with a wide range of cultural references, to propose that instead of thinking of temporal experience as linear, orderly and forward-flowing we might consider it as ‘closer to clay on a potter’s wheel, something we can grip, turn and remould. ‘

• Squadrons of pigs: Stefan Collini’s overview for LRB [£; limited free access] of the many troubles facing Britain’s universities.

• Enshittification, despotification, and the open internet: Mike Masnick is very good for Liberalism.org on the past and a possible future for the architecture of the internet:

The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.

• The end of books — what happened when a dumpster arrived behind my university’s library: a gorgeous essay by Sheila Liming for The Yale Review about the digital, Derrida (don’t be put off) and the decline of books.

• Magnifica Humanitas – doin’ the Vatican rag: who better to comment on the Pope’s recent encyclical about AI than digital guru Bill Thompson, still (thankfully) with the BBC but writing here on his personal blog?

It feels somewhat.. ironic (in the real sense of the word not the Alanis Morissette one) that the Holy Roman Catholic Church seems to be the most significant large organisation to speak out against the potential dangers both of AI and the US government’s slide into authoritarianism and repudiation of international law. And the Pope may not have many divisions but he does have over a billion believers.

• How Anthropic used AI ethics slop to play the pope and eclipse OpenAI: And if you still have the energy and interest for more reading about AI, the Holy Father, and much more, this is very good from Brain Merchant for Blood in the Machine [gift link].

• And finally…: Sadler’s Wells’ Dance Film Festival opened on Friday with a conversation with choreographer Damien Jalet and a screening of two films which feature his dances. One was the phenomenal STORM, directed by Romain Gavras and starring Swedish rapper Yung Lean.

Since STORM has racked up more than 14 million views on Youtube in the month since release, you have almost certainly seen it, although not was we were privileged to do on Friday — on a huge screen with the music played VERY loud. Jalet’s choreography features in a single, long-held shot towards the end. Here it is (with a content warning that it features some moderately violent scenes and threat):

The post The Sunday dozen appeared first on Illuminations.

Back in London from Monday night, but meanwhile below is this week’s list of articles that caught my attention.

• Why the BBC matters: 5 minutes that are well worth your time, from the evidence given on 19 May by Sir Peter Bazalgette (former chair of ITV PLC), Dr Alex Mahon (former CEO of Channel 4 Television) and Pat Younge (former Chief Creative Officer, BBC Television) to the Culture, Media and Sport parliamentary Select Committee:

• Hollywood, Gaza and the invisible blacklist: urgent from Alex Press for LA Review of Books, with a story co-edited with The Key, and co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

• Lumière, le cinéma!: a conversation with Thierry Frémaux: David Schwartz for Criterion talks with the director of a compilation 120 of the Lumière brothers films, ‘beautifully restored, into a coherent feature-length work that functions as a love letter to cinema and as an essay film’. 

• Kazuo Ishiguro’s top ten train films: terrific list, courtesy of the BFI, of films set aboard trains, with a couple of titles I have never heard of; no space, sadly, for Caught on a Train, the Stephen Poliakoff/Peter Duffell/Kenith Trodd film for BBC2’s Playhouse strand, which apart from all else has an excellent Mike Westbrook score – it’s available on iPlayer now, in a recent and fine 4K restoration.

• The Finsbury Park Empire: a fascinating online presentation from The London Archives about the north London music hall, with some great images.

• August Sander’s enormous attempt to capture a lost world: Max Norman is very good for The New Yorker [£; limited free access], wonderfully well-illustrated, on the pre-war images of the great photographer, currently on display at Yale University Art Gallery:

Sander, who died in 1964, never recovered from the damage done by what he called ‘the subhumans of the Hitler band. ‘People of the 20th Century’ is his loving death mask for a world that vanished before his eyes.

• In Venice, the passion of life and the ghost of art: such a thoughtful and productive review of ‘In Minor Keys’, the central curated show in Venice by culture critic at The New York Times [gift link] Jason Farago.

• ‘How can nudity be so provocative?’ Florentina Holzinger on rocking Venice with naked jetskiers, human bells and urine divers: terrific Guardian profile by Hettie Judah of ‘dancer, artist, choreographer, leader of Europe’s coolest performance girl gang, and the woman most likely to rekindle childhood dreams of running away to join the circus.’

• Pop & pleasure & freedom: a wonderfully expansive essay for New York Review of Books [£; limited free access] by Jarett Earnest about the writings of Jon Savage, including his most recent book, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream.

• The missing piece: as ever, Luke McKernan’s blog is a delight, with a new post on jigsaws, and on a great novel scandalously missing from the Guardian‘s Top 100, Georges Perec’s Life – A User’s Manual.

• Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability: I really ought to link to Christ Grey’s acute analysis of British politics every fortnight, but his most recent post, after the month we’ve all lived through (even in France), is especially useful as a way of making sense of things.

• Squillions: as readable and as informative as ever, John Lanchester for LRB [£; limited free access] on the mystery of missing cash and international money laundering.

• And finally…: from The Late Show this week, with this intro, ‘I’m here to support Stephen Colbert, the first guy who lost his show because a president can’t take a joke – and the Ellisons feel they need to kiss his ass… small-minded people with no idea what freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.’

The post The Sunday dozen appeared first on Illuminations.

• Why? Because… with Jean-Pierre Gorin: most of us will not get to the film season that one-time Godard collaborator Gorin has programmed for L’Alliance in New York, but we can all enjoy his idiosyncratic programme notes; as Richard Brody says, ‘he’s one of the greatest critics, or, more, cinema-thinkers’.

• Mike Figgis looks back on Leaving Las Vegas: “My credit rating had gone down a lot. I was known as a troublemaker”: a very engaging interview with the filmmaker by Lou Thomas for BFI, tied to a new restoration and re-release of the film.

• How the The Fast and the Furious tells the story of Hollywood: for The New Yorker [£; limited free access] Hua Hsu responds to Dan Hassler-Forest’s new book, “Fast and Furious Franchising,” that argues that ‘the series is central to understanding the evolution of Hollywood over the past twenty years’.

• First Look 2026: The Misconceived: for Reverse Shot, Chloe Lizotte writes about James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ latest, a low-budget feature made entirely in the 3D graphics system, Unreal Engine, that is mostly used for video games:

it’s… impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.

• How Billie Eilish and James Cameron captured a pop show in 3-D glory: background on the ground-breaking concert film from Steve Knopper for The New York Times [gift link], with contrasting reviews from Brandon Yu for the same paper (‘an often electric document of Eilish’s show: the pure quality of image and visceral sense of 3-D immersion is spectacular, as if we’re feeling a new form of presence in performance}, and the Guardian’s Owen Myers (‘Eilish and Cameron are mismatched in flashy pop documentary that misses the subtlety of her music’); and here is the trailer (with – thanks to my hols – subtitles in French):

• Being Eugène Atget: sparked by another New York cultural event most of us will miss (a show curated by David Campany at the International Center for Photography. that in any event just closed), this is nonethless a very fine essay for LA Review of Books by Tobias Czudej about one of the truly great figures in the history of the medium.

• V is for vagina: a typically knotty yet immensely rewarding essay by T.J. Clark for LRB [£; limited free access], prompted by Willem de Kooning’s 1958 painting ‘Suburb in Havana’.

• What does a woman swimming in urine tell us about the state of the world? Lots! – Venice Biennale review: Eddy Frankel with a very fine extended Guardian report from the art world focus of the month, including details of what’s clearly a remarkable Florentina Holzinger installation-performance.

• Quest for a nostalgia I never lived: materials decay faster than images: as if there wasn’t enough US culture in this week’s selection, here is Rory Peckham for The Brooklyn Rail looking for a largely lost Route 66 (with some fine photographs too):

Nostalgic memory and physical reality rarely align, especially not ninety years later. But images have a strange endurance. Long after buildings deteriorate or disappear, the pictures people carry—postcards, signs, stories, bits of neon—continue to circulate. The Route 66 I encountered could not have existed in quite the way it was imagined from the 1930s through the ’80s. If anything, the road now holds a layered history: motels, preserved signs, demolished buildings, and the memories that continue to shape how the place is understood. Images cannot decay, but the material that produced them can.

• 5 minutes that will make you love Ron Carter: this is such a great New York Times series [and this is a gift link], with Giovanni Russonello here, and a clutch of distinguished musicians, hymning ‘history’s most recorded bassist, who turned 89 on Monday and is currently celebrating the milestone with a five-night run at the Blue Note in Manhattan.’

• Auden by Peter Ackroyd: I appreciated Mathew Lyons’ review of the new study, for the blog The Broken Compass.

• How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake’: also from Guardian this week, a really thoughtful essay by editor Katharine Viner.

• And finally…: just because:

The post The Sunday dozen appeared first on Illuminations.

On the way here we stopped off for a day in Beaune. Wandering through the backstreets we came across this delightful memorial to Étienne-Jules Marey, who we learn was born in the town in 1830. As Wikipedia says, he was ‘a French scientist, physician, physiologist, chronophotographer and inventor.’ And for anyone engaged by the pre-history of the cinema, the most interesting of these roles is ‘chronophotographer‘.

Wikipedia can explain further:

In 1889, Étienne-Jules Marey coined the term “chronophotography” to describe a technique for capturing instantaneous images. Inspired by Jules Janssen ‘s astronomical revolver (1874), this technique employed a new film camera he developed in collaboration with his assistant  Georges Demenÿ , which he initially called a “chronophotograph” — the term “chronophotography” was officially adopted in 1889.

This technique involved taking a rapid succession of snapshots on a single strip of light-sensitive paper, and later on celluloid (invented in 1888 by John Carbutt), using a camera equipped with a single lens. This allowed for a more precise analysis of the different positions of objects during movement.

Marey’s monument has him as an older man seated, but as if explaining something to a listener. Behind him, carved in low relief, is a succession of horses in movement, captured in stone rather than on a photographic plate. And above (although not that easy to see in my photos) is a realisation of a bird in flight, much as Marey himself sculpted as a three-dimensional visualisation of his analysis. At his feet, below, is a photographic gun in stone.

On the reverse of the monument is an impressive citation of the good doctor’s achievements, although while recognising how he is a part of the pre-history of film, to salute him as ‘inventor of cinematography’, as I take one line to read, is definitely a step too far.

The post Marey memorialised appeared first on Illuminations.

Posts will continue but with slightly dodgy connectivity they may be a little late, like this week’s miscellany of articles and audio that have engaged me over the past week. And the link to this week’s header image, which is my photo of Henry Moore’s Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3, sited at the Brandon Estate in Lambeth, is the second of the Municipal Dreams blog posts highlighted below.

• Nine Days in May: an excellent History of the BBC contribution by David Hendy about the pre-Corporation Company during the General Strike that began on 2 May 1926. As he writes,

The public wanted up-to-date information on a rapidly changing crisis, and with newspaper printing at a standstill the BBC was in a unique position to fill the void. Yet, the BBC’s role in the Strike was to prove highly contentious, and proved to be the first major flashpoint between broadcasters and the Government over questions of impartiality and independence.

See, or rather hear, also Archive on 4: Voices of the General Strike, now on BBC Sounds.

• Senses of Cinema 117: the latest issue of the fully open online magazine is as essential as ever, with – amongst much else – a wide-ranging collection of articles about the tensions associated with contemporary film festivals.

• All the President’s Men is 50 years old. A former Post staffer tells us why that matters: terrific from Ann Hornaday for LA Times.

• A constellation of different animals: do read Luke Dunne in LA Review of Books on the German filmmaker, writer, and theorist Alexander Kluge, who died recently at the age of 94:

Kluge’s films and fiction alike are often playful, flamboyant, sentimental (though rarely saccharine), and frequently very funny. That none of this comes at the expense of intellectual or moral seriousness, that Kluge refused to acknowledge this trade-off in the first place, is part of his charm. War and capital-H History, yes, but also angels, opera, and slapstick. For Kluge, there simply was no either-or—only both-and would ever do. 

• The LCC and the arts I: The open-air sculpture exhibitions, and The LCC and the arts II: the ‘Patronage of the Arts’ scheme: two absolutely exceptional Municipal Dreams blog posts, the second of which is about the LCC’s art for schools and public places project that was inaugurated in 1956, and which gifted among many other pieces the great Henry Moore pictured above.

• The audacity of art at the Obama Presidential Center: a delightful New York Times article [gift link] by Robin Pogrebin, with visuals by Kevin Serna, about the visual art commissions for the new Barack Obama presidential library, which opens officially in Chicago in June; works by Richard Hunt, Julie Mehretu, Idris Khan, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Rashid Johnson, and Martin Puryear are among those featured.

• Walt Disney visited a Ford factory in 1948. What he witnessed there laid the groundwork for what would become Disneyland: courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine, Roland Betancourt presents an extract from his new study Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth.

• Dancing about architecture: for Urban Omnibus, writer and dancer Maxwell Neely-Cohen speaks with Rennie McDougall about her book Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Made New York City and the links between dance the urban environment.

• The Habsburg International: Hari Kunzru’s brief blurb for this rich Do Not Research essay runs as follows:

I wrote about Stefan Zweig and the surprising afterlife of the Habsburg Empire. Nostalgia for a multilingual, multicultural space in which trade flowed freely, drove everything from the foundation of the UN to the free market theories of Neoliberalism.

• How close reading took over the internet via The Devil Wears Prada’s cerulean monologue: I don’t quite buy Kate Travers’ argument for The Conversation but I enjoyed reading and thinking about it.

• A day in Canterbury: a lovely illustrated ramble with Luke McKernan through a city I know nearly as well as him:

Canterbury is a time machine. One senses each and every age simultaneously, in its variety, its unevenness, its untidiness. An olde Citie, somewhat decayed, yet beautiful to behold, so the sixteenth-century writer and city resident John Lyly described it. It has always been what it is.

• Richard Dawkins and the Claude delusion: as Matthew Sheffield writes, most entertainingly, for Flux, ‘the author of The God Delusion is now suffering from a Claude delusion’.

• Easy to join, easy to leave: William Davies with an exceptionally interesting review of Anton Jäger’s new Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation Without Political Consequences for LRB [£; limited free access]:

The politics that is currently encouraged and exploited by the contemporary radical and far right is born of the confluence of an imagined community (both good and bad), represented and disseminated on video-sharing platforms, and the reality of a depleted community that is visible to many people in their day-to-day lives. 

• And finally…: I’m in France, which is enough of a reason to share Edith Piaf singing ‘La vie en rose’, on French television on 4 March 1954.

The post The Sunday dozen appeared first on Illuminations.

One recent fascinating edition features Patricia Linton talking to Dr Anna Meadmore, archivist at The Royal Ballet School about de Valois’ ballet Checkmate. As the Voices… website notes,

Checkmate is one of the only two ballets by Ninette de Valois to survive in the repertoire. It makes allegorical use of a chess game to represent a battle between love and death. Arthur Bliss, the composer, and Edward McKnight Kauffer, the designer, worked with de Valois’ ideas in a way that made perfect sense of the ensuing battle, and testified to her commitment to Serge Diaghilev’s ideas on the importance of music and design in ballet…

As well as reflecting on the ballet’s genesis and its key dancers, the podcast is especially interesting on the possible political meanings of the ballet. Although neither the Voices… website nor the podcast notes, Checkmate was also broadcast on several occasions by the BBC television service from Alexandra Palace, and this gives me the excuse to showcase one of my favourite images from Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of British Television.

Checkmate was first performed by de Valois’ Vic-Wells company at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris in 1937, with June Brae as the Black Queen, Harold Turner as the Red Knight, and Robert Helpmann and Pamela May as the Red King and Queen.

The ballet was given the following year on television on 8 May 1938, although the spectacular BBC publicity image of the Prologue above, highlighting McKnight Kauffer’s modernist backcloth and an Emitron camera in the foreground, appears to come from one of the broadcast reprises on 19 and 22 February 1939. The figure with the outstetched arm is ‘Love’, danced by Jean Bedells.

By the spring of 1938 the Vic-Wells company was to be seen regularly on the service, although this 40-minute ballet, with the same principals as in Paris, was their most ambitious broadcast to date. The critic for The Times enthused about producer D.H. Munro’s presentation as ‘something new, a dramatic emotional picture in terms of photography.’ The anonymous reviewer continued,

The most interesting innovation in the televised version of the ballet was the use made of shadows. Mr. Frederick Ashton [sic; the dancer being praised was Helpmann] was an extraordinary picturesque figure, flanked by the red pieces who cast interesting shadows on a plain backcloth. Later he was even more impressive sitting on his throne in lonely and terrified majesty, while the menacing shadow of the attacking Black Queen advanced towards him sword in hand. 

When Munro reprised the ballet in February 1939, with the same cast, the Radio Times correspondent ‘The Scanner’ also praised the interpretative work of studio cameras:

Television gives something that the theatre doesn’t, a trained eye… One [camera] can be used for showing the general scene, an “establishing” shot, the other two for closeup and angle shots. The cameras, in other words, are doing exactly the work of trained human eyes – first the scene as a whole, then concentration without distraction on some salient feature.

In Dancing Times, the regular, knowledgeable critic Jeannette Rutherston also enthused extravagantly about the re-run. ‘The ballet was a triumph of skill on the part of everybody in any way connected with its televising,’ she hymned. 

The post ‘Checkmate’ on pre-war television appeared first on Illuminations.

The Cultures of Early Television is a two-day conference about television before the Second World War in Britain, continental Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union. With presentations, panels and screenings of rare archival material, the event marks the centenary of the first British public presentation of what John Logie Baird called “true television”, which took place in London in early 1926.

The conference brings together scholars and archivists from Britain, Europe and North America to explore imaginings and understandings of early television, and its productions and people, rather than its technologies, which has been the dominant construction of this history to date

One central focus will be early television’s intermedial entanglements with the radio, cinema, theatre, dance and visual arts of the first half of the twentieth century. Parallel to this will be a concern to develop a transnational dialogue for a field that has largely developed along national lines.

The conference should be of interest not only to media historians, but also to those concerned with mid-century culture more broadly, to social historians, and to those with a general interest in the development of television.

A list of keynote and other confirmed speakers so far is on the registration page, with a small number of others to be added shortly. You would not expect me to say anything different, but I really do think this is going to be a fascinating event, with great presentations, some rare archival screenings, and terrific people.

Front Row: The Birth of Television – A Forgotten History

As a taster for the event, or if you would simply like to know more, over the Easter weekend BBC Radio 4 broadcast a special edition of Front Row about the first years of television, to which I contributed, which you can listen to here.

The other guests are Lisa Kerrigan, senior curator of television at the BFI; Francis Spufford, whose new novel Nonesuch is partly set in the BBC studio at Alexandra Palace in 1939; and Joy Whitby, producer and creator of significant programmes including Play School and Jackanory. Samira Ahmed chairs immaculately.

Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain

… and of course my book about all this remains on sale from Bloomsbury here. Andrew Male was kind enough to give it an enthusiastic review in Sight and Sound, describing it as

this meticulously assembled and thoroughly entertaining history of the first decade of British television… Wyver… has miraculously reconstructed a vanished narrative of interwar life.

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Given such thorough preparation, Archives at the Heart of Society is, in some ways, a comparatively modest (online) document. Nonetheless it makes a really strong and convincing case for the central importance of archives, and for why they must be accessible, inclusive and sustainable. Using it as a yardstick against which to measure the operation of the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) shows just how far short of best practice the Corporation’s archive falls.

Regular readers will know that Ian Greaves, Kate Murphy and I, with the support of some 600 scholars and story-tellers, have been campaigning against the changes made just over a year ago to the operation of WAC. We remain especially concerned about the withdrawal of ‘on request’ vetting of files from the two-thirds of the holdings that to date have not been made public, a decision which renders independent, curiosity-driven research all-but impossible.

We despair at how obdurate the WAC executives have been in their refusal to reconsider this, and at how they have demonstrated in on-line meetings and statements how little they appear to understand or to value the research of academics and others outside the BBC. This, despite extensive press coverage of these concerns.

At the same time, we profoundly regret the decision to stop responding to enquiries from members of the public. Also, it is entirely unsatisfactory that physical access for researchers via the Caversham reading room has been reduced from three to just two days each week.

Moreover, we disagree with WAC limiting use of its facilities to just ‘writers who have been commissioned to write a book or article; those undertaking research for a commercial project, [and] academics in higher education undertaking accredited research.’ The restrictions are detailed here, and are more tightly focussed than has been the case in the past.

Why archives matter

Now take a look at how the current WAC measures up against the Government’s (and TNA’s) new stategic vision, the first part of which is Why archives matter. In support of the statement that, ‘Archives matter because they empower people and shape society in countless ways’, the vision details eight excellent reasons, including

• Archives hold individuals and institutions to account, including by providing crucial evidence in public inquiries and other legal cases.
• Archives help communities to reclaim previously marginalised histories.
• Archives enable effective decision-making and inspire innovation in every field, from business and tourism to technology and city planning.
• Archives power the creative industries, inspiring books, plays, films, adverts, music, art and design.

All of which, the riches of WAC have unquestionably facilitated, and can potentially continue to contribute to do, in vital and unique ways.

The core of the strategic vision is then laid out, with this statement at its heart:

Our vision is for archives to be valued and preserved as a source of inspiration for everyone. The foundation of this vision is the integral role of archives at the heart of society. Archives preserve the records of our shared past, deepen our understanding of the present, and plant the seeds of inspiration for our future.

Exactly.

The ways in which WAC falls short

WAC’s shortcomings, however, are revealed when measured against the next section, which argues for the central importance of archives being Accessible. ‘Archives,’ it states, ‘must be shared widely and be easy to use to remain integral to our society.’

This is the first count on which WAC falls short. With the closing down of ‘on request’ vetting, with the new limitations on opening times, with the ending of responses to enquiries from members of the public, and with the restrictions on who can use WAC, there is no sense in which its resources are available ‘to be shared widely’ and ‘easy to use’.

A supplementary concern here is that – and it still astonishes me to write this – there is no publicly available catalogue of the WAC holdings, further shutting down any possibility of its resources being ‘shared widely’ and ‘easy to use’.

We know, thanks to a Freedom of Information request, that a public-facing catalogue was developed with considerable resources in the early 2020s, and that a pilot version was ready to launch, but that internal nervousness, including from the person responsible for liason with the Royal Family, nixed this just ahead of it coming online.

Similarly, when at the end of last year a tranche of files were released for use by researchers without vetting, no detailed listing of these files was published, and we have been told that there are no plans to do so. Again, this significantly limits the value of this release for serious research. The end result of all this is that WAC access is now more strictly on the BBC’s terms, and in the BBC’s interests, than ever before.

All of which speaks to the second count against which WAC must be marked ‘fail’, namely the next section of the vision, headed Inclusive. Here, the key point is that, ‘Archives must be representative and welcoming of everyone to remain integral to all of our lives.’ Yet for the reasons detailed, there is once again no sense in which the current WAC can claim to be ‘welcoming of everyone’.

The third element of the vision is that archives must be Sustainable, by which the authors mean not only ‘environmentally sustainable’ (which is crucial, and which WAC is probably rather good at) but also

Archives of all types must have the necessary funding and conditions to remain integral in the future.

The necessity of new thinking and new relationships

Of course we recognise how challenging the times are for the BBC, and how budget cuts are impacting all of the activities of the Corporation. But here the vision makes an important argument for all archives:

These financial challenges demand new ways of working, entrepreneurial approaches and focused investment. This is a vision for growth, and securing additional resources by maximising grant opportunities, generating income and partnership working is vital to its success.

Similarly, in the Accessible section of the strategic vision, there is an important call for archives to ‘seek out innovative collaborations spanning academic institutions, cultural organisations and technology firms to provide access to an even wider variety of records for all’.

In our on-line meetings with WAC executives we have endeavoured to raise the idea of collaborating on grant applications and other initiatives to find ways of doing exactly this. But to date we have been met with a lack of interest bordering on outright rejection. Nonetheless, we persist in believing that this is an important way forward, which we will continue to explore.

With no new Government funding in prospect for archives, the challenge for TNA and the sector will be, as the final section is titled, Turning vision into action. The promise is that

The National Archives will develop a robust action plan to deliver on the three strategic themes of this vision. This plan will have clear goals, measurable outputs and transparent reporting on the progress of the archives sector. Throughout the life of the vision, task groups will be convened to focus on key challenges, spark innovation, and share best practice.

It feels vital that WAC recognises this, makes essential changes and begins to work more collaboratively and openly with academics, cultural organisations and others. Yet WAC is not currently represented on the Strategic Vision steeering group, which otherwise has figures from ten external organisations, including London Metropolitan Archives, Museum of English Rural Life and Natural History Museum.

WAC, and the BBC more generally, should – must – be a leader in this field, and it is desperately disappointing that it is not, and that currently it appears to have little interest in being so.

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• The disappearance of the public bench: although this excellent Gabrielle Bruney essay for Places journal is focussed on US examples, the arguments she makes are absolutely applicable this side of the pond too:

Benches, like other public amenities, are places where optimistic visions of civic life meet messier realities. They’re sites of leisure and contestation that invite a range of constituencies with vastly differing needs and desires… To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.

• DTF St Louis is an utterly original drama of male loneliness: I have enthused previously about this uncategorisable show that is available here on Sky, and Philip Maciak for TNR does a good job at capturing its peculiar and particular beauty.

• Inside the world-conquering rise of the micro-drama: Change Che for The New Yorker [£; limited free access] with an astonishing report on the production of serial dramas in one-minute segments:

China’s discovery of a new form of entertainment—one already worth billions of dollars—has put it on a collision course with the incumbents in Hollywood. In October, Fox Entertainment said that it plans to produce more than two hundred micro-dramas in the next two years… On a podcast last June, Kevin Mayer, a former C.E.O. of Disney and TikTok, explained that there was “no longer the revenue base” to sustain the old pipeline of expensive television productions. Micro-dramas, with their low-cost, fast-paced storytelling, may be the new frontier.

• Militant chemistry – an interview with Alice Lovejoy: from The Photographers’ Gallery, a very good interview by Jon Uriarte with the author of Tales of Militant Chemistry, The Film Factory in a Century of War, a new study of two of the most powerful film companies of the twentieth century: Kodak and Agfa. 

• Michelle Henning: Photography’s Dirty History: also from TPG, a complementary presentation in the form of a richly illustrated lecture by the author of A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire:

• The precarious deaths of monuments and This liminal moment: two complementary responses to the important MONUMENTS show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Brick, by Jillian McManemin and Bridget R Cooks respectively, for LA Review of Books.

• The rise and fall of David Adjaye: a fascinating essay by Martin Filler for New York Review of Books [£; limited free access] — ‘Three high-profile buildings by the eminent Ghanian British architect have just been completed, but allegations of sexual misconduct have severely damaged his prospects for future commissions.’

• How a museum doubled its attendance in just one year: such a positive story about MoMI, New York, by Melena Ryzik for The New York Times [gift link], with great visuals by Gus Aronson

• Against the grain: London’s last jukeboxes: I enjoyed Deborah Nash for The Wire on the last few remaining jukeboxes in London pubs.

• Victor Serge was one of the great revolutionary writers: responding to a new biography, Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary by Mitchell Abidor, Ian Birchall for Jacobin on the remarkable author and, for many, hero of the Left.

• The conundrums of Jan Morris – a conversation with Sara Wheeler: for The Paris Review, Jamie Lauren Keiles speaks with the biographer of the remarkable writer.

• Civil war in the UK: nightmare or far-right fantasy: reflections about language and politics from Jonathan Portes for UK in a Changing Europe:

Language influences how people interpret politics. Repeated claims that institutions are illegitimate, that democratic outcomes cannot be trusted, or that the state no longer represents “people like you” do not simply reflect dissatisfaction. They help construct a narrative in which democratic processes are seen as fundamentally compromised. 

• Don’t use A.I. to do this: wise (and funny) words from author Colson Whitehead, for The New York Times [gift link].

• Vanishing Culture: a Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record: an important free-to-download report from Internet Archive, written by Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland and Juliya Ziskina, about the fragility of today’s digital culture and the importance of attending to how it can be maintained and preserved.

• And finally…: I go on holiday to France on Wednesday, which is unquestionably a good enough excuse to include Anna Karina performing Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Roller Girl’ in Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 television film:

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