A Pageant By Radio
Every now and again one is struck by a newspaper review of a pageant which is so benign and gives so few details about the actual performance (other than what could be gleaned from the programme) that one wonders whether the journalist in question actually bothered going to the trouble of visiting the pageant at all. Journalists from the Times had a habit of wandering off during pageants set in particularly beautiful settings to have reveries about a country house and its fine gardens, as at Arundel Castle in 1923 and the George Herbert Tercentenary Pageant (1933), where the reporter found himself wandering ‘titter toter’ along the cedar-lined avenues of Wilton House, musing on the life of the illustrious poet.[1]
The correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, reporting on the Spirit of Warwick Pageant (1930), organized by the skilled Pageant Master Gwen Lally, didn’t even pretend. Instead, they chose to listen to the whole thing broadcast on the Midlands Regional Programme.[2] The reporter was struck, not by ‘the absence of colour and movement but their mysterious though elusive presence was the remarkable fact that emerged from the broadcast’.[3] Nonetheless, the pageant-listener complained of the poor quality of the transmission: ‘It was very difficult to disentangle the announcer’s voice from the medley of noises incidental to the pageant, there was a break in the line at one period, and for a very long time a noise resembling Morse did its best to obliterate the entertainment.’[4]
Outside Broadcasting had first been attempted on 8 January 1923, when Mozart’s The Magic Flute, performed by the British National Concert Orchestra, was broadcast from Covent Garden Opera House by installing a quarter-of-a-mile-long cable to Marconi House on the Strand.[5] Recording from a building designed to create the best possible acoustic levels was very different to the requirements of broadcasting and transmitting from Warwick Castle, where the pageant was held, and in capturing, without personal microphones, the voices of all the performers as well as the music of an orchestra performing outdoors. Whilst earlier Pageants, such as the Bristol Pageant (1924) and Plymouth Mayflower (1927) had used the radio to advertise the events through talks or even performances of incidental music, the Spirit of Warwickshire Pageant was (to my knowledge) the first live broadcast of a pageant on radio.[6] Despite the Manchester Guardian’s criticisms, the experiment soon became a staple of regional broadcasting, with a compere providing an explanation of visual cues.
The Manchester Guardian journalist remarked ‘we saw Shakespeare put to sleep by Titania and her fairies,’ and particularly warmed to the final scene with the Warwick Mop: ‘No doubt the spectacle far outrivalled the sound in joy, but here at any rate was a very fine impression of an excellent pageant made by the radio to those who were not fortunate enough be able to be present.’[7]
When we think about the experience of pageant-going, which I wrote about last month,[8] we should also consider how the development of new technologies; film, radio and ultimately television, alongside those used at the live pageant such as voice amplification, new lighting techniques and sound effects enriched the experience of pageants, whether for those at the Pageant or, for those like the lazy reporter from the Manchester Guardian, those viewing from the comfort of their front room.
For more information of BBC radio programmes, explore the BBC Genome Project:
[1] Times 8 June 1933, 10.
[2] A Commentary on The Pageant of Warwickshire, BBC Regional Programme Midland, 16 July 1930 16.10, accessed 29 April 2016, http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/af1967e402d14032837021e4d6bbcb64
[3] H.J.H., ‘A Pageant by Radio’ Manchester Guardian, 17 July 1930, 12.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Gordon Bathgate, Voices from the Ether: The History of Radio (Aberdeen, 2012), 33.
[6] ‘The Bristol Pageant’, 5WA Cardiff 20 May 1924, 19.30, accessed 29 April 2016 http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/b80370f1d5e2408a97fb2ff7c2abceef’; ‘The Mayflower Pageant’, 5PY Plymouth, 8 April 1927, 19.45, accessed 29 April 2016 http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/d55db0fbf2624692b9deb37d250b951c
[7] H.J.H., ‘A Pageant by Radio’ Manchester Guardian, 17 July 1930, 12.
[8] http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/blog/view-st-pauls/