Death at Broadcasting House

The door into 7C was flung open, and Hancock burst into the passage. “Come here, Julian, for God’s sake!” he said. “Quickly. There’s been an accident!”

That accident turns out to be murder. The victim is actor Sidney Parsons, alone in studio 7C and on air at the time. But who amongst the cast and staff is the murderer? This is the opening premise of the story Death at Broadcasting House, filmed in 1934, adapted for radio in 1996 and now this week being read on a Book at Bedtime by Tim McInnerny.

Broadcasting House had been in use just over a year and the suite of studios used for drama productions provided the setting for much of the action. The more technically complex the drama the more studios were used for different acoustics, live musicians and sound effects with the main studio overlooked by a viewing room. The whole production would be mixed and controlled from the dramatic control panel.  So it was two people with a good inside knowledge of the building that came up with the germ of the story whilst on a 16-day holiday in the south of France – dictating the 70,000 words to a BBC secretary. Concocting the mystery were friends and colleagues Val Gielgud, at the time in charge of drama at the BBC and Eric Maschwitz, who often wrote under the name of Holt Marvell, the head of the Variety department.

Most sources say that Death at Broadcasting House was published in 1934, and indeed it was published in book form by Rich & Cowan in February 1934. But it first appeared in serialised form in the pages of the October, November and December issues of Modern Wireless magazine in 1933.

Death at Broadcasting House is a story of professional rivalries, illicit affairs, blackmail, Scotland Yard inspectors, amateur sleuthing, gloves and mystery phone calls. The story opens during a live broadcast of the play The Scarlet Highwayman written by Rodney Fleming. Directing is Julian Caird, the BBC Dramatic Director. At the controls is the Balance and Control Engineer Desmond Hancock. The cast of actors includes Sidney Parsons and the husband and wife team of Leopold and Isabel Dryden. The BBC staff include General Sir Herbert Farquharson (presumably Sir John Reith), Stewart Evans of the Programme Research Department , sound effects man Guy Bannister, studio manager Ian Macdonald and studio attendant Joe Higgins. Called in to investigate is Detective Inspector Simon Spears. (Spears would appear in three further books including The First Television Murder set in the BBC’s studios at Alexandra Palace). 

To add extra realism to both the serialisation and book versions we have copies of internal memos, running orders and studio maps, these closely follow the real Broadcasting House layout. We’re also introduced to a new piece of technology that proves critical in cracking the case, the Blatterphone. These steel tape recording devices were really only in use by the Empire Service as they allowed for the re-broadcast of domestic programmes to the world and for programmes to be transmitted in different time zones without calling broadcasters, actors or musicians back into the studio at all times of the day or night. “We blatterphoned the transmission of The Scarlet Highwaymen and we are transmitting it to the Empire in” – he glances at his wrist-watch – “exactly seven minutes’ time.”

The book enjoyed, according to Gielgud, “considerable success” and thought that a film version would be “a copper-bottomed commercial proposition”. Eventually they found a willing producer in Hugh Perceval at the newly formed Phoenix Films. It was filmed over 29 days at the Wembley Park Studios in North London (later used by Associated-Rediffusion and LWT before becoming Fountain Studios and closing in 2017) at a cost of £18,000. Getting a general release in November 1934 it would gross £90,000 at the box office. A shorter five reel version was also issued, presumably to run as a second feature, with cuts to the cameo appearances and all the songs to achieve a 42 minute running time (as against the 75 minutes of the eight reel version). 

One of the dramatic control panels at Broadcasting House.
Photo copyright BBC.

The film was able to pretty accurately portray the Art Deco interior of Broadcasting House with its maze of studios and the dramatic control panel.  The ‘death’ occurs in studio 7C. This really was a studio used by the drama department. It was a speech small studio (19’x19’) and had a totally dead acoustic. 7C was later combined into the larger two-storey drama studio 6A.   

According to Gielgud “expenditure was very sensibly allotted rather to the settings than to the cast.” Gielgud appeared in the film, effectively playing himself, as Julian Caird. The only real stars of the day were Ian Hunter who played the (renamed) Inspector Gregory and Austin Trevor as Leopold Dryden. Donald Wolfit, yet to start his famous touring company, played Parsons and a young Jack Hawkins was Evans. This being a thirties film it was almost obligatory to have at least one song and dance routine and this film offered two, including an early performance from American singing star Elisabeth Welch. Radio stars of the day also make cameo appearances including comedian Gillie Potter and journalist Vernon Bartlett.  

The film adopts a lighter tone than the source material, Basil Mason was tasked with writing the screenplay, and it benefits from the production design of R. Holmes Paul and the photography of Austrian émigré Günther Krampf, whose films included the expressionist horror classic Nosferatu (though he was uncredited). Halliwell described the film as an “intriguing little murder mystery with an unusual background”. Elizabeth Welch was less enamoured with it: "It was so awful that I told everybody they should have left Broadcasting House out of the title and released it as Death!” It is the Broadcasting House setting that provides the real interest rather than the plotting and the performances.

Surprisingly the film doesn’t appear to have been shown on television until nearly four decades later. It finally aired on 3 September 1982 – which isI when I first saw it – on BBC2 as part of a season of films marking the BBC’s 60^th. That seems to have been its only BBC showing, and perhaps it’s only terrestrial tv showing, unless you know otherwise.

However, the film hasn’t been completely forgotten. In recent years the wonderful Talking Pictures TV have given it the occasional run and in 2013 Network issued it on DVD. A Blu-Ray edition was issued in 2020. At one time it was on YouTube but at the time of writing, it can be found on Arhive.org.

Although BBC television never gave Death at Broadcasting House a second showing, BBC radio did revisit it in 1996 as a Saturday Playhouse production on Radio 4 as part of a Cinema 100 season. The play, running at 86 minutes, was adapted by crime writer Sue Rodwell – she would later adapt some of Ted Willis’s Dixon of Dock Green scripts for the radio. Appearing as Julian Caird is John Moffat (radio’s Hercule Piorot) and there’s a star-studded cast: Peter Sallis (Inspector), Graham Crowden (Director General), Jeremy Clyde (Fleming), Roger May (Bannister), Bill Nighy (getting all indignant as Dryden), Diana Quick (Isabel), Julian Glover (Evans) and Nicky Henson (DS Ring). The great thing about this version is that it was recorded in drama studio 6A where the majority of the studio action is set in the original story. This programme has been repeated a couple of times on Radio 4 Extra. You can, at the time of writing, find it on YouTube. Bill Nighy would come across another corpse at Broadcasting House in the 2008 Charles Paris series Dead Side of the Mic.

Back in the present, this week on Radio 4 we get another chance to hear the story, as abridged by Lucy Ellis and read by Tim McInnerny. It can be heard in the Book at Bedtime slot Monday to Friday at 22.45 and will be available on BBC Sounds.

Staying with radio drama history for the moment its worth picking out a couple of programmes that go out today (Saturday). Comedy for Danger (also sometimes just called Danger) by Richard Hughes is regarded as the first play written for radio to be broadcast by the BBC. It was part of an evening of plays produced by Nigel Playfair broadcast by 2LO on 15 January 1924. This short play was set in a mining quarry and the Radio Times suggested that listeners” might well sit in darkness to correspond with the play’s setting, which will also be in the darkness of a mine.” A 1973 re-recording of Danger is repeated for the first time since 1973 today on 4 Extra. Produced by Raymond Raikes it stars Christopher Good, Carol Marsh and Carleton Hobbs. It was originally heard on Radio 3 on 1 October 1973 under the Stereo Drama strand. [Whether Comedy for Danger was the first play written for radio remains in dispute. An earlier contender is the Christmas Eve 1922 2LO broadcast of The Truth About Father Christmas written by Phyliss Twigg. Sadly no script survives so we have no record as to how this was performed]. 

Taking inspiration from Danger is a new drama called Danger 2023 by Michael Symmons Roberts. Here the lights go out on a party visiting a remote 'doomsday' bank deep under the desert containing a vast collection of historical and cultural data about our lives. It’s the Saturday afternoon drama on Radio 4.   

The story of how Danger came to be made was told in last year’s play A Leap in the Dark which is on BBC Sounds. It does, however, contain a number of factual errors that will make any radio or drama historian wince.

About the Authors:

Eric Maschwitz

Eric Maschwitz had a CV that one can only marvel at (pun intended). He was a songwriter and scriptwriter often using the nom de plume of Holt Marvell and is best known for A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and These Foolish Things and the screenplay of Goodbye, Mr Chip s (1939) for which he has a co-writing credit. He’d worked as a freelance writer for the Hutchinson’s magazine group. In 1924 he wrote the best-selling novel A Taste of Honey a year before he married actress Hermoine Gingold.  He started at the BBC in 1926 in the Outside Broadcasts department. From September 1927 he’d been the acting and then permanent editor of the Radio Times. With the creation of a separate Variety Department in 1933 Eric was offered the head of department.  There he introduced a number of well known programmes such as In Town Tonight, the Scrapbook series as well as opening a new base for variety shows across Langham Place at St George’s Hall.

He and Val Gielgud were already firm friends before working together at the Radio Times. On air Maschwitz contributed to many broadcasts under Gielgud’s department or direct production. Those programmes included talks, plays (including an adaptation of Rupert of Hentzau and Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival), musicals and the romantic operetta Good Night Vienna!   

Maschwitz was Director of Variety for four years until June 1937 when he left for Hollywood to work for MGM after they’d offered to buy the film rights for his musical Balalaika and a writing contract more than ten times his BBC salary. During the war he was recruited by the intelligence services (SIS, SOE and the Army’s Intelligence Corps).  He was assigned to the British Security Coordination (others included Roald Dahl, Noel Cowerd and Cedric Belfrage, brother of BBC newsreader Bruce Belfrage) where he was head of the forgery section running Station M (M for Maschwitz) in a Toronto suburb. In 1942 as a Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) he was head of a War Office Broadcasting Section in the Army Directorate of Welfare and Education where he was instrumental in setting up the Field Broadcasting Unit. He moved to the Political Warfare Executive preparing propaganda leaflets from the secret HQ in Woburn Abbey. At the end of the war he helped requisition Hamburg’s Musikhalle as the first HQ for the British Forces Network (later the BFBS).                

Post-war he was Chairman of the Songwriters' Guild of Great Britain which at times put him at loggerheads with his old employer. On the broadcast of popular music programmes he decried they were “flooded with ready-made and degraded American successes” whilst variety shows were all “hectic talk and semi-hysterical laughter.” Nonetheless he rejoined the BBC in 1958 as Head of Light Entertainment, Television and then in 1962 under a special contract as advisor with the title Special Duties (Programmes). He left the Corporation in 1963 to work for commercial rivals Associated Rediffusion as a producer of special projects as well as the comedy series Our Man at St. Mark's. 

Eric Maschwitz 1901-1969

Val Gielgud

Val Gielgud spent most of his working life involved in drama production and was the department head for a remarkable 35 years. He’d started at the BBC in 1928 as an assistant at the Radio Times under Maschwitz’s editorship, though he’d already appeared on air delivering a number of talks. He was an “out of work actor” before joining the Corporation and got the job without an interview, the old boy’s network coming into play as he knew both Maschwitz and the BBC’s head of publicity Gladstone Murray. He worked on the editorial pages including the letter’s page and later admitted to writing a number of letters under various names complaining bitterly about radio drama.

He helped with some of the BBC’s amateur theatrical productions in which even the austere John Reith took part. During rehearsals for the comedy Tilly of Bloomsbury, in which Reith played a drunken broker’s man, Gielgud rebuked him for being late. This actually helped Gielgud’s job prospects when in 1929 they were looking for a new department head. “This fellow Gielgud will do. If he can be rude to me, he ought to be able to tell a lot of actors what to do.” The job was as Productions Director, a wide-ranging brief that included drama as well as the revue and vaudeville section.

By 1933, following the move from Savoy Hill into Broadcasting House the previous year, Gielgud wanted to concentrate on drama “without troubling himself with ukulele players and comedians” so was appointed Director of Features and Drama, with Variety hived off to his chum Maschwitz. Here he set about helping forge a new style of radio drama mixing standard works by the likes of Ibsen, Chekov, Noel Cowerd, Edgar Wallace, Somerset Maughan, and, of course, Shakespeare with more experimental work. He was particularly keen to encourage new writing for radio and declared “the future of broadcast drama lies with authors who are prepared to write directly for the microphone”. (Early 30s drama was often billed as “written for the microphone”). His books How to Write Broadcast Plays and the later The Right Way to Radio Playwriting were standard references for any aspiring radio dramatists. When television came along he was also involved in that, including the first experimental drama production of Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, broadcast simultaneously on the National Programme and the Baird television transmission in July 1930.    

He still occasionally worked with Eric Maschwitz on programmes such as the ambitious broadcasts over four nights live from Hungary in Night Falls in Budapest (1935). He would direct his rather more famous brother John on three occasions: The Importance of Being Earnest (1936), The Great Ship (1943) and for the Third Programme in 1959 Oedipus at Colonus.

Gielgud was also a prolific writer of both radio plays – such as Exiles, Red Tabs and Mr Pratt’s Waterloo – and novels, usually thrillers. His books, written over a period of about 40 years included series featuring Anthony Havilland and Inspector Gregory Pellew. 

At the start of World War II the drama department was evacuated first to Wood Norton and then to Manchester though difficulties in getting artists to go north meant they eventually moved back to London, occupying studios at Maida Vale. During the war the Saturday Night Theatre strand started (Gielgud would produce over 30 of them), the Drama Repertory Company was re-formed and there were the beginnings of drama series rather than one off productions such as Appointment with Fear in which Gielgud would collaborate with John Dickson Carr.

After the war when the television service re-started Gielgud also had tv drama within his remit, not something he relished and in 1952 he was back to radio with the title Head of Drama (Sound).

One of the post-war developments was the daily serial, notably Mrs Dale’s Diary and The Archers. Gielgud dismissed both, especially the former which he though “sociologically corrupting” as it encouraged “mediocrity of mind” among listeners. Millions listened to both. At the same time he eschewed the avant-garde of the 1950s so he increasingly left the production of such drama to others.    

Looking at his contribution to the BBC, Hannah Khalil wrote (in 2013) of Gielgud’s many contradictions: “he claimed to want to move away from theatre-style productions on radio, but was from a theatre background; he pushed the boundaries and experimented with the form, and yet he was more at home with Shakespeare than he was with contemporary writing; he recognized that radio was for the masses, but he loathed soap operas or anything too populist”.

Gielgud retired from the BBC in 1963, passing over the drama baton to Martin Esslin. 

Val Gielgud 1900-1981

With thanks to Roger Beckwith