[Commlist] New Book: Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain

John Wyver's book *Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in 
Britain* is now available from Bloomsbury/BFI.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/magic-rays-of-light-9781839028205/

Until Sunday 22 February, it is on offer at £18.89 (plus p&p) for the 
paperback and only £14.57 for a .pdf or .epub digital version.

There is also a hardback for institutional sales, now on offer at 
£66.50, when the usual price is £95; do please consider recommending it 
for a library purchase.

    *

On the evening of 26 January 1926, inventor John Logie Baird held a 
public demonstration in his workspace on London's Frith Street of a 
'seeing by wireless' apparatus that he and many others had been working 
towards, television. In the years that followed, variants of this 
astonishing device produced programming that was rich, complex and 
excitingly imaginative. Familiar television genres, including studio 
drama, quiz shows, variety spectaculars and sports broadcasts, were all 
fully realised in the 1930s. 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.

    *

'It is entirely appropriate that this book's title mentions magic: what 
John Wyver has achieved here is nothing short of miraculous. Wyver takes 
a period of television production long thought to be out of our grasp 
and constructs a painstakingly researched history of its key personnel, 
programmes and technological developments. He illuminates the 
relationships between early television, cinema and radio, and highlights 
the creativity and innovation of those making it. This will change 
everything we understand about the early development of television in 
the UK'

    Helen Wheatley, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University 
of Warwick

Contact John Wyver at (j.wyver /at/ westminster.ac.uk)

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