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Over 78 years ago, four men and a woman gathered in John Logie Baird’s new studio in central London and carried out an experiment with the infant medium of television. They had no idea they were about to give birth to an art form that would dominate the world and lead to decades of hand-wringing over sex, violence and profanity: television drama. Baird, the inventor of television, a radio producer called Lance Sieveking and three actors broadcast the first play adapted for TV on July 14, 1930. The shaky 30-line live transmission of The Man with the Flower in His Mouth by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello could only be seen by around 1,000 persons. The technology used to record later broadcasts did not yet exist. Now the script of that drama has been made available to the public for the first time, along with fascinating BBC reports analysing whether the experiment was a success or not. The play was directed by the BBC’s director of production, Val Gielgud, the brother of the actor, Sir John. In June that year, during rehearsals, Sieveking wrote: "I have devised a production method, and a television dramatic script, which I hope may be the foundation of the future technique. Gielgud and I, with the co-operation of Baird, experimented with the possibility of quick varying focuses, to see whether in a play it would be possible to have ‘close-ups’ ... Though electric photocells cannot be focused as quickly as the lens of a camera, nonetheless the result is impressive and can be used dramatically." He added that a "gratifying effect of perspective is obtained in a picture in which the back of the nearest speaker’s head is seen, while beyond it, smaller, is the face of his vis-`E0-vis". The shot he describes, still a standard one in the industry, was chosen because the script about a dying man, who sees the world in a fresh light, did not demand much scenery or camera movement. Pirandello’s original script, now believed lost, was photocopied by a BBC producer called Derek Brady in 1967. He and Sieveking were reproducing part of the broadcast to celebrate the Ideal Home Exhibition. Brady has since kept his photocopy of the 15-page script, complete with original annotations and notes, until last week, when he handed it over to the British Film Institute’s (BFI) television archive. Joan Moat, the BFI’s head of special collections, said, "It’s a very important part of television history. It was, in effect, the first independent production." Also among the papers gifted by Brady to the BFI was a BBC report from 1931. It said, less enthusiastically: "The experiment is still too recent for its implications to be grasped. It is possible that all the lessons learnt will only need to be forgotten." — By arrangement with The Independent
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