Magic Rays of Light

Popular memory holds that television in Britain began with the 1953 Coronation. But as Magic Rays of Light reveals, extensive programming throughout the 1930s was creatively rich, complex and excitingly imaginative. Numerous familiar elements, including studio drama, quiz shows, variety spectaculars and sports broadcasts, were fully realised in these years. 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 a writer and producer with Illuminations, and Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster. His numerous productions for television and event cinema have been honoured with a BAFTA, an International Emmy and a Peabody. His other publications include The Royal Shakespeare Company on Screen: A Critical History (2019) and the collection co-edited with Amanda Wrigley, Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television (2022).