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

On the evening of 26 January 1926, inventor John Logie Baird held a public demonstration in his workspace on London’s Frith Street of a ’seeing by wireless’ apparatus that he and many others had been working towards, television. In the years that followed, variants of this astonishing device produced programming that was rich, complex and excitingly imaginative. Familiar television genres, including studio drama, quiz shows, variety spectaculars and sports broadcasts, were all fully realised in the 1930s. At the same time, early television was often strikingly different from later domestic broadcasting.

Television began with intimate entanglements with interwar cinema, theatre, music and dance. And, despite reaching only tiny audiences, from its beginnings television responded to key strands of social history, embracing legacies of the Great War, changing roles for women, suburban living and more.

Magic Rays of Light is a unique and comprehensive cultural history of early television, exploring its technologies and institutions, while also celebrating the programmes and the people, the ideas and the innovations of the first decade of what would become the most consequential medium of the subsequent century.

John Wyver is Professor of the Arts on Screen at the University of Westminster, UK. For Michaelmas Term 2022 he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls Oxford. He is the co-founder of independent media production company Illuminations, and he is Director, Screen Productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
His work as a producer and director has been honoured with a BAFTA, an International Emmy and a Peabody Award. He has made numerous documentaries about the arts and about digital culture. He was Series Editor for the influential BBC2 series The Net (1993-97) which pioneered tie-ups between broadcasting and online systems. He was also Series Editor for Tx. (1993-98), an award-winning series of innovative arts documentaries.
John Wyver has produced a series of notable performance films for television, including Richard II (1997) with Fiona Shaw; Gloriana - A Film (1999), directed by Phyllida Lloyd; Macbeth (2000), with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter; Hamlet (2008), made with the Royal Shakespeare Company and with David Tennant as the prince; Macbeth (2009) with Patrick Stewart, directed by Rupert Goold; and the RSC’s Julius Caesar (2012), directed by Gregory Doran.
In 2013 he produced the RSC’s first live-to-cinema broadcast, which brought Gregory Doran’s production of Richard II with David Tennant to more than 370 UK cinemas and which was also seen in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Over the past eight years he has produced 30 further ’event cinema’ presentations of RSC stage productions, in addition to the 2016 ’Shakespeare Live! From the RSC’ celebration, co-produced with BBC Two. Other screen adaptations that he has produced include Clowns (2018) with Hofesh Shechter Company, and Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2020) with Almeida Theatre.
As writer and director he made two recent archive-based documentaries for Illuminations and BBC Four: Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today (2020) and Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain (2021).
His books include Vision On; Film Television and the Arts (2007) and Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History (Bloomsbury, 2019).