The Rise and Fall of the Reithian Sunday: 1936-1959

Christopher McCullough

Christopher McCullough is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter.

"Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No Good can come of it."
Attributed to CP Scott, Editor of the Manchester Guardian.

An attempt to identify the concept of nationhood, let alone the mythical structures attendant upon such a concept, is a complex business. It is not simply a question of recognising and trying to gain an objective view of patterns of ideology, but it is also a matter of locating and even separating the precise cultural moments of our 'making'. One such area of activity that has had, I will argue, a profound influence in the creation and dissemination of the cultural myth of 'Englishness', is the growth of the BBC and, in particular, the early years of television broadcasting, when there was only one television channel (that which we now know as BBC1) under the patronage of John Reith.

The period of John Reith's management of the BBC was predominantly the era of the radio, or to be more accurate the 'wireless'. In the first volume of his autobiography, Into the Wind' [1] he stated that he regarded television as 'a social menace of the first magnitude'. His main aim was, if he could achieve that degree of control, to restrict its use by restricting its hours. The intention (giving due recognition to the irredeemable flaws in the medium) being to maintain the loftiest possible standards; the restriction of transmission ensuring the value of the programmes. This essay will focus on that marginal concern of Lord Reith's, the BBC television service and, in particular, the nature of Sunday night transmissions.[2]

The nature of Sunday broadcasting on BBC television, since its inception in 1936 and certainly into the late 1 950s, combined Reith's own calvinistic attitudes (derived from the Presbyterian Church) with liberal humanistic ideologies that may be traced back to Matthew Arnold. It is important to consider television programmes as part of a pattern on a particular day, rather than to attempt to treat them as independent texts. Sunday television, up to the advent of ITV's limited transmissions in 1955, was an uneasy mix of straightforward religious broadcasting and secular, but edifying programmes, often involving classic dramas and programmes of an educational nature, with a transmission close-down for many years approximately between 5pm and 8pm.

What I choose to call the 'Reithian Sunday' may have long disappeared in its fullest sense, but vestigial remains are still with us in the essentially middle class form of the BBC's Songs of Praise and its more sentimental version on ITV with Harry Secombe. In some ways the tradition of the Sunday evening television on the BBC serves as a microcosm of the whole mythology of the BBC - an indefinable sense that the BBC represents, or has done so in a mythical past, located somewhere between 1936 and 1960, a seriousness of intention and integrity lacking in the commercial television channels. This notion is upheld by the belief that the licence fee frees the Corporation from the commercial pressures that require playing to the 'lowest common denominator'.

Some qualification is needed here.The concept of playing to the lowest common denominator may well be more populist than popular - certainly an area for debate that would take up more space than this essay will allow. Interestingly, and paradoxically, the letters BBC originally stood, not for British Broadcasting Corporation, but for British Broadcasting Company, which came into existence in 1922 after much hard-nosed commercial bargaining. It was not until the end of 1926 that 'Company' became 'Corporation' and assumed an identity that appears to be transcendent of both state and commercial interest. It is one of the interesting contradictions of well-vaunted Thatcherite values, that while harking back to this mythical past of Grammar schools and suburban families by the fireside with just the single BBC channel to watch, they simultaneously wish to drag the BBC into the commercial sector.

The ethos of early BBC television programming became a clear manifestation of a symbiotic relationship (possibly uneasy) between the liberal humanist ideology that informed the development of the teaching of literature in universities and schools in the twentieth century and JCW Reith's own sabbatarian paternalism. Reith certainly thought of broadcasting as having the potential to do more than simply relax people in their own homes - although it must be made clear that predominantly his thoughts were towards radio and not towards the emergent television. His struggles with television were more a case of controlling the medium and ensuring that it did the least possible harm. Reith of course 'retired' from the BBC in 1936, the year that the world's first public television service came into being. It is more appropriate, therefore, on grounds of historical chronology as well as ideology, that my concern should be more 'Reithian' than Reith. A more complex cultural pattern emerges if we observe Reith as a component in a dominant ideological thrust, than if we isolate and mythologise the individual; the myth is sociocultural and not individual.

The First Season

BBC television public transmissions started in August 1936, when at Radio Olympia people could queue to enter a darkened booth to view a newsreel of the (civil) war in Spain spattered with spots of white, Jessie Matthews dancing in her new film and sequences of white clouds scudding across grey skies. Throughout 1936 and 1937 transmissions were sporadic, concentrating on the weekdays and only occasionally broadcasting on a Sunday. However, the combination of programme content and the advertising of schedules in the Radio Times that forms the pattern inviting analysis, developed rapidly, even though regular Sunday broadcasting did not commence until April 10 1938.

With the inception of the BBC television came the inclusion of the television schedules in the Radio Times. A cursory glance at the layout of the Radio Times in the 1930s will reveal that an air of respectability, even perhaps the hint that it was a document with aspirations of literary merit, was signalled in the type face. This took the form of a delicate character style with more than a hint of the influence of copper plate handwriting.

Although photographs are evident, more often the illustrations were woodcuts, or even occasionally, etchings. Indeed the woodcut illustrations became a trademark of the Radio Times will into the early 1960s. The new medium of 'high' technology needed to appropriate from the images and techniques (or at least the appearance of them) of'high'art. Similarly we will need, at a later point in this essay, to observe the same transference of values from one medium to another, as represented in the concept of the serial adaptations of respected novels and the transmission of classic drama.

Clearly the early controllers saw a need to attain artistic respectability for the new medium by the exploitation of cultural objects already afforded that status.

When the schedules for the medium of television came to be inserted in the Radio Times, a different approach was employed. The approach to programme content emulated, to a degree, the style of radio, but the type face was markedly different to that used for radio and ironically, as any glance at today's Radio Times will reveal, the space given to Radio was considerably more than that given to television. Today, of course, the positions are reversed, with radio schedules having been marginalised by the dominant medium of television since 1957.The typeface heading for television for the 1937 Christmas programmes was distinctly bold and twentieth century, not dissimilar to contemporary computer type face. The type for the programmes was similar, though not so pronounced. Curiously the Radio Times was by then employing the vaguely Dickensian border illustrations which in certain forms still exist for radio schedules on the religious festivals. However television schedules were not highlighted in this manner until the mid-fifties.

In 1937 Christmas Day was a Sunday. By today's standards the list of programmes was extremely limited. Transmission commenced at 2.30pm with Moonshine, a fantasy by Laurence Houseman starring Leonard Sachs and a number of string and shadow puppets. This was followed at 2.50 by a Christmas Party in the children's ward of St George's Hospital; 3.45 offered Richard Hearne (Mr Pastry) in Puddings Christmas. Transmission then ceased until 8.50pm when a national news bulletin was followed by the last programme of the day, a production of Noel Coward's Hay Fever.

By April 1938 the schedule of programmes for Sunday transmission had not changed to any radical degree. Sunday April 10 is fairly typical, the most noticeable difference being that transmission did not commence until 8.50pm, leaving daytime Sabbath clear of distractions. Just five programmes were transmitted offering a similar range of fairly innocuous (and sometimes even edifying) content: 8.50 News; 9.05 The Blue Madonna a dance by Wendy Toye, to the music of Bach's Air on a G String; 9.10 Clothes through the Centuries - Grandmama looks back and shows her granddaughter that clothes were clothes in those days; 9.25 News Film (Gaumont British News); 9.35 - 10.15 Wien a Viennese entertainment with the BBC Television Orchestra.

Post-War Return
BBC Television closed down in the September of 1939 with the advent of the Second World War, returning on Friday 7 June 1946 with a repeat of the same Mickey Mouse programme that had been the final transmission of 1939. By 1950, with the BBC still holding the monopoly, Sunday broadcasting had expanded quite considerably, but in two respects held on to the values of the 1930s.The hours of transmission were still strictly controlled and normally no broadcasting took place during the hours of church services. The only exception to this rule was in the case of religious festivals, when a special service was the subject of transmission (for example - 24 September 1950 Harvest Festival Evensong and 12 November 1950 service of Remembrance). The second point of note was the nature of programme content, which still offered a familiar mix of material considered to be, at least on a secular level, worthy of the day.

By 1950 the concept of the serial adaptation from novels had been successfully transposed from radio to television and formed the dominant element of'Children's Hour'. In the late 1920s radio had been under attack for producing serial adaptations of novels, being accused of complicity in a plot to deprive children of the joy and skill of reading. However, the opening of a television studio exclusively for the use of Children's Hour, by Mrs Clement Atlee on May 21 1950, must be seen as a signifcant step towards the cultural acceptance of radio and television. A brief summary of the range of adaptations will attest to the seriousness of content for this particular programme 'slot'. The point that I would come back to is the ideological foundation laid down for Sunday broadcasting which had its genesis in Reith's sabbatarian vision. Over the decade 1950-1959 the following adaptations are well representative of Sunday childrens' broadcasting. TheAdventure of the Nazarin Stone, by Conan Doyle; a childrens ' version of Shakespeare's Henry VI part one from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production with Richard Burton; Little Women by Louisa M Alcott; Mountain Ash by Kenneth Anderson; A Midsummer Night's Dream 'adapted' for children; Let's make an opera; The Tempest 'adapted' for children; The Black Arrow (twice); The Bishop's Treasure adapted from Victor Hugo; St Ives and Treasure Island by Robert L Stevenson; A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; The Railway Children by E Nesbit.

We may trace an interesting development here that forms an intrinsic part of the mystique of the BBC in the eyes of many middleaged and middle-class viewers. From disapprobation in the 1920s for depriving children of the skill of reading novels for themselves, the BBC has retained elements of that critique, while simultaneously being seen as a repository for certain values that form part of the myth of a 1950s Sunday. The adaptation of classic novels on a Sunday afternoon has attained a paradoxical cultural significance of its own; at one and the same time it occupies both a marginal and a central ideological position. In one sense we may observe the potential, as Gramsci might argue, of the jostling of residual and emergent ideologies in relationship to a literary cultural hegemony. [3]

While the time slot roughly between 4pm and 5.30pm was being colonised by Childrens ' Hour, the evening schedules for Sundays were undergoing a similar process, whereby the decorum of the day was preserved at least in part. Sunday night television, especially on BBC1 was for many years known as a time when a classic play, often, but not always Shakespeare, would be performed; the evidence would point to TS Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral as being the most often performed play on television in the 1930s and 1940s, with JB Priestley being the most performed playwright of the period in question. It may be that there was a suitability in the dissemination of the work of these two writers that was considered particularly apposite to Sunday night broadcasting.

However strong the attempt to keep the programming of Sunday transmissions to a form of secular edification, as early as the mid1950s programmes of distraction, rather than meditation, were scheduled. These programmes fell into two broad categories: light entertainment with elements of comedy, as exemplified by Showband Show directed by Cyril Stapleton and Holiday Hotel with Jewel and Warriss; and what may be seen as the appropriation of middle class parlour games into the new medium in the form of Guess My Story and later What's My Line.

Classic Dramas
Despite this frivolous intrusion, the mainstay of Sunday night transmissions was the classic drama, usually broadcast after the earlier 'light' entertainment and before the act of Christian meditation that often closed transmission around 10pm.The secular meditation preceded the religious meditation. The purpose, it may be argued, behind this regular slot for the classic drama was twofold: we are already familiar with the idea of an appropriate cultural event for Sunday night, whereby the least amount of disturbance to the sabbatarian peace may be achieved, but simultaneously, we may understand the need for the new medium of television to acquire a cultural authority provided by the dissemination of 'literary' values. The subject matter for these transmissions gives a good indication of the cultural level to which the medium was aspiring; although it would be to oversimplify the problem to classify all the material into one category. An initial division would suggest that as well as classic drama there was also a 'minor', in a sense, a more local diet to be offered. It is into this category that the frequent transmissions in the 1930s,1940s and 1950s of RC Sherriff's Miss Mabel, Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice, JM Barrie's The Admirable Crighton and Dear Brutus and HG Wells' The History of Mr Polly might fall.

However, occupying a more challenging task for the medium, not the least because of the centrality of their cultural acumen, are the classical dramas. Shakespeare inevitably occupied - and to a degree still does - a central position from the very inception of the BBC television service (although the BBC/Time Life series killed off that particular currency for some time to come) [4]. The balance of Shakespeare was evenly distributed between the plays as categorised by the 1623 Folio and although certain textual cuts were made to meet the restrictions of the medium no great cognisance was taken of restricting the plays in length to fit in with programme schedules. This attitude is still very much the case with television Shakespeare in Britain today. One of the problems for the BBC/Time Life series was that having been made in this country for non-commercial television, the productions had to be cut drastically in order to fit into USA commercial slots; a dichotomy that helps to perpetuate the BBC's high cultural currency.

While Shakespeare was without doubt important to the establishment of Sunday night television values, the range of the classic drama was wide and international, with Ibsen and Chekhov being well represented, as well as less well known European writers such as the brothers Capek. English language writers - GB Shaw, Pinero, O'Neill, Conrad, Hellman, O'Casey, Congreve, Travers, Wilder - were representative of the period up until 1959.The sheer range of material employed simply for Sunday evening transmission serves as a salutary reminder of the paucity of contemporary schedules.

The presence of Conrad in the latter list of authors highlights one further area of innovation and cultural exchange: the adaptation of novels for television. This has been referred to in the case of children's television, where the adaptation was most likely to involve a 'reselling' of the story for younger viewers; a modern Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. However, increasingly the adaptation of novels became both the focus of a new creative industry and the exploration and development of the new medium; shifting the process of cultural appropriation more towards a reciprocal cultural exchange, whereby respected authors were beginning to take on the business of television adaptation of the work of other authors, as a task with its own intrinsic merits.

The Interlude
An important point in the transmission schedule up until 1957 (and sporadically in 1958) was the break between 4pm and 8.50pm (the times vary, but are always, approximately, late afternoon to early evening). It may, or may not have been foremost in the minds of the programme planners for Christmas Day 1937 but it certainly was in the mind of John Reith and the planners over subsequent years, to close transmission down at that time of the day for very specific reasons. On weekdays (particularly during the 1950s) the closedown became known as 'Toddlers Truce' - a period of time when mothers could persuade their children to go to bed with the minimum of distraction.

On Sundays however the motive was more to do with Reith's attitudes towards the Sabbath. In short, television was not to be permitted to offer an excuse for people to miss evening services at their church; the assumption being that everybody belonged to one Christian denomination or another. The break in transmission became a context in which a virtually new art form found its genesis and brief existence: the Interlude. The Interlude was a short film most ubiquitous in the years 1954,55 and 56 and transmitted usually just before the evening broadcasting services were resumed.The content of the Interlude would seem apposite to the whole argument concerning the need of the new medium to assert its cultural worth.

There were three main Interlude films; the most famous of which involved a potter throwing a pot on a wheel. The other two depicted a typically English pastoral scene and a kitten playing with a ball of wool. The potter's wheel seems particularly appropriate to the dichotomy between the religious observance of the sabbath and the potential for secular edification contained in the classic drama. In this Interlude we are offered a concrete example of the forging of material (clay and water) with the aesthetic; the potter's hands in direct contact with the rhythm of the clay's momentum are forging the aesthetic of the pot. This image is almost irresistible as a paradigm for the cultural development of BBC television through to the end of 1959.

Beyond the arguments surrounding the development of early Sunday television are the tensions emanating from questions of textual identity. The possibilities opened up by television productions of stage plays and adaptations of novels simultaneously widen the audience for these works and fix them in film and video. Of course television in the early days had no recourse to such means of fixing the televised text; all television was live and thus possessed a similar transitory textual nature to that which we may perceive in theatre. It may be useful to consider the point made by Terence Hawkes in his essay Shakespeare's Talking Animals:[5] "Television constitutes the only really 'rational' theatre our society is likely to have". Certainly the mythology of Sunday television with the tradition of classic serials and evening dramas has achieved a certain degree of homogeneity in our post-war society.

NOTES:

1 JCWReith, Into the Wind first volume of his autobiography (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949). The second volume being Wearing Spurs (London, Hutchinson, 1966). John Reith, later ennobled, was born on July 20 1889 one of seven children of Mary and the Reud Dr George Reith a minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church; a denomination of the Christian faith whose strict views were to shape the whole of John Reith's life. (return)

2 All references to the BBC, unless otherwise qualifed, should be taken to refer to the original television channel and what is now known as BBC1. (return)

3 Antonio Gramsci The Prison Notebooks. Also Raymond Williams Problems in Materialism and Culture (Verve NLB, I 980). (return)

4 For a discussion of these issues see Political Shakespeare eds Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (MUP, 1985) and The Shakespeare Myth ed Graham Holderness (MUP, 1988). (return)

5 Terence Hawkes Shakespeare's Talking Animals (London, Edward Arnold, 1973). (return)