Ghosts of 1930

THIS was a hell of a thing to see tonight, and it’s left me weirdly uncomfortable for some reason.

I gather that this was the almost entirety of the cast and crew of the production of The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, the first play shown on British television back in July 1930. Forty years later. almost everyone in that photo (including all three of the cast) was still alive and accordingly appeared on some BBC show called Review to show how it was done using the original Baird 30-line gear, a period microphone, etc.

And it just felt… strange. Not least because, obviously, the 1930 technology was so limited compared to what the BBC had by 1970 (never mind how much further it’s progressed since then); this performance certainly did give what I imagine was a pretty accurate reconstruction of how the 1930 production looked and sounded, and it’s quite fun to imagine TV as we know it blossoming from… this thing. But it was more than that somehow. There was something a bit “unco” (to use a good Scottish word Baird himself might have used) going on. Like ghosts being summoned.

I mean, even if you don’t consciously register it, there’s always ghosts being called up whenever you engage in some old media where the people involved have left this world behind, but this had some very particular ones. One of those ghosts, obviously, was that of the original production, which vanished into the ether as soon as it was finished in those days before recording. Though the actors were 40 years older by then, it was still the same actors as in the 1930 broadcast, and indeed the same crew. I suppose, too, there’s also the ghost of the long-dead production method as well, finally defeated in 1936 by Marconi’s electronic camera system.

But, like I said, there was more it than just watching an old TV show… I don’t know anything about Review; with a name like that I can’t exactly find much information. What sort of show even was it? How much of it did the BBC keep? (I mean this is the BBC we’re talking about here; as I’ve been saying for a long time, if the BBC made something before about 1978 and it still exists, it almost certainly does so by accident rather than design.) Is anyone involved with it still with us, like the original Man With the Flower team were for them? I suspect Review is as lost to history as most of the BBC’s programming from that period, and watching it tonight in 2025 on the BBC’s Youtube archive channel was kind of summoning its ghost just as the show itself was trying to summon that of the 1930 play. Ghost within a ghost?

I don’t know how to really express it, nor indeed why I’m trying to do so; yet again, I’m sure this is something that only I even notice or care about. For whatever reason, though, there was something kind of uncanny about watching this TV show that’s even further in time from us now than the TV show it was about was from them when they made it, those people who were still alive then wouldn’t be for much longer…