Well, here’s a bit of TV history for you, being the earliest complete surviving BBC drama… I once observed on my old film blog that if any BBC production made before they finally ended their policy of wiping their master tapes in 1978 still exists, it probably does so by accident more than design. This is particularly true of their 1950s shows, when pretty much everything was live and rarely telerecorded in the first place; I suspect it was a somewhat random decision to so record Rudolph Cartier’s February 1953 version of It is Midnight, Dr. Schweitzer, and it probably survives just as randomly. (US networks were already somewhat better than the BBC at this sort of thing.)
I’ll be honest upfront and acknowledge that I don’t fully know how to appraise this, cos I suspect the original telerecording was kind of mediocre at best (cf. the two extant Quatermass episodes from a few months later, which are pretty ho-hum) and the copy of it I scored off Youtube many years ago (which is evidently no longer available there and I can’t find it anywhere else) is a shit copy of that. So visually it’s awfully hard to judge… but then again this almost works just as a radio play, and with a few adjustments it could probably have been turned into one.
Plotwise, Albert Schweitzer is working his hospital in Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa (as Gabon was at the time), but it’s August 1914, and, well, you know what else was kicking off that month… and that makes the good doctor’s position in a French colony as someone who was technically German (Schweitzer having been born in Alsace, which Germany had owned since the Franco-Prussian war) kind of difficult. This is kind of the action of the play, such as it is. It’s perfectly well-acted, I suppose, and it is… well, very much acted. The one review of it on IMDB calls it “a worthy play about worthy people”, and that seems accurate; it’s a play that seems kind of impressed by its own subject matter, and it felt like it was relying on the fact that it’s about Albert Schweitzer to maintain interest more than anything else.
And it feels very much like a stage play too… apparently it did use pre-filmed sequences to a more advanced degree than was usual, but it still doesn’t open up the thing that much, with only five credited cast and some minimal sets and a bunch of sound effects by which the natives are mostly represented apart from a couple of scenes (cos obviously the natives were hardly people as such, were they; even Schweitzer loses his shit at them at one point). Hence why I said it could almost have been a radio play, cos it relies so much on off-screen noises anyway.
It’s quite long and dry, and what we have is actually the shorter version of the production; I gather standard BBC practice then was to broadcast a play first on Sunday night, and then restage it the following Thursday, which was the one to be recorded if they could be bothered doing so. In this case, the first version apparently ran 20 minutes over time and so Cartier cut a bunch for the second showing, which is what we have now… and oy but I can’t imagine this having been even longer, this is stodgy enough as it is.
So I’ve no idea how representative this is or isn’t of early BBC live drama, cos so little of it still exists (and I’ve seen almost none of what does). That said, though I can’t say I was a big admirer of this example of it, I remain impressed by the fact that it went out live for a hundred minutes with minimal pauses. I have the Criterion Collection’s Golden Age of Television DVD set, and I was always meh about the excitement expressed therein about how amazing it was when live American TV started doing 90-minute productions rather than 60-minute ones… I mean, great, but the BBC had been doing that for years and without the benefit of ad breaks. Still, you know how it is, if it didn’t happen in America, it didn’t happen anywhere…
