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.
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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 60th. 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 was, for many years, 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. [The first play
written for radio was broadcast just over a year earlier by 2LO on Christmas Eve
1922. The Truth About
Father Christmas was written by Phyliss Twigg].
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
This post was edited in December 2025
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