November 2019, Issue No. 14
TIME TRAVEL NEXUS PRESENTS . . .
The Time Machine on BBC
25 January 1949
—Of course you know that recently I’ve sequestered myself up in the ITTDB Citadel, working hard on the new Internet Time Travel Database. Among other things, we Time Travel Curators have been tracking down archive footage of old time travel films and TV shows, but sadly, we’ve had no luck in securing a copy of the first visual presentation of The Time Machine back in 1949 on the BBC—possibly because it was never recorded. But we did find two 1949 views of the show, the first of which is an essay from the Radio Times of the day in which John Swift runs into the Producer (Robert Barr) and Designer (Barry Learoyd) who re-created The Time Machine for the live broadcast:
To the World’s End in Sixty Minutes
by John Swift
from p. 25 of the Radio Times, 21 January 1949
They were talking about re-creating The Time Machine as a television drama. It was a small gathering, not unlike that which Wells himself conjured up fifty-odd years ago as the preliminary to the flight through Time of his fantastic contraption of brass, nickel, ivory, quartz, and heaven-knows-what. The Man-in-the-Corner might well have been the Medical Man. You may recall that he was not too anxious to be mixed up in the affair—he had a reputation to maintain.
‘I don’t believe it’s possible to do it,’ said the Man-in-the-Corner. He said it with an air of finality. He was not imaginative.
‘Now if you put the Machine into reverse,’ opined the Stout Little Man with the waxed moustache (he would be ideally cast as the Provincial Mayor), ‘I’d say you could do it. You’d know what you were about, if you see what I mean,’ and he went on to tell of an aged film, something about a Yank at the Court of King Arthur. He had imagination, but it went backward—the Wellsian Time Traveller did not.
It was the tall, lean man with an evil-smelling pipe—let us call him the Psychologist—who was in his element, probing into the minds of two men who believed they could Interpret these Wellsian imaginings in visual form. If they refused defeat, why should he? But he could think of no way out.
‘Surely,’ he said, ‘every one of us has a different conception of practically every being and thing in the book. My interpretation of the sunset of mankind may be entirely different from that of my butcher or my coal merchant, so how can you put it in pictures?’
‘Talking of pictures,’ I interjected, ‘I did hear tell of a film company that got The Time Machine on the stocks. The script-writers had to have aspirins for breakfast every morning and in the end everybody concerned gave up the ghost.’
‘There, I told you!’ said the Man-in-the-Corner, and the Stout Little Man nodded knowingly.
The Producer had taken little part in this conversation, but the problems propounded on all sides were as a bit between the teeth.
‘All right!’ he said. ‘I know it’s not easy, and I know we all have our own idea about every single thing in the book. I read it when I was twelve, and I read it last week and my idea of it is still much the same. But it may not be everybody else’s idea. Millions of people have read and re-read it, and if nobody has attempted to interpret it visually then it’s time someone did. We may succeed, we may not, but faint heart never made good television—if you will forgive the metaphor.’
‘And I’m with you,’ said the Scene Designer at last. He had hoped, by keeping his peace, to pick up some ideas of the shape of a land crab three-million years hence or a suburban house in a mere 25000 a.d. But nobody had yielded any ideas.
‘You’ve both decided you’re really going to make a shot at it?’ asked the Psychologist.
‘Yes.’
‘Right. Now let’s consider just a few of the problems. At the very beginning you will have to make the Time Machine disappear from the Time Traveller’s dining room?’
Indulgently, the Producer and Designer smiled. That was an easy one, but every man to his trade.
‘And what about those delicious people of the Golden Age, the Eloi?’
‘That,’ said the Producer, ‘is a matter of casting—and clever make-up. They will have to be of small stature with delicate features and voices pleasing to the ear. Wells gave us enough detail to go on. I think most of us have a similar idea, at least, of the Eloi.’
‘And those dreadful Morlocks underground?’
‘Ah, now that’s a different proposition. They were loathsome creatures, but fortunately they lived in darkness. That is where the viewers’ imagination will play a big part.’
The Stout Little Man wriggled himself up from his armchair. ‘Yes, we’ll accept the people,’ he began, ‘but what about the things—houses, roads, methods of transport, dress, even in the next hundred-thousand years?’
‘My dear chap,’ replied the Designer, ‘Imagination—assisted by Mr. Wells! He has given us a number of hints; the great, bubble-shaped mass homes which I have in mind for the Eloi, for instance, are not beyond possibility. But in any case, the next few hundred-thousand centuries flashed by in moments. Remember “The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me . . . the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness . . .”?’
‘Ah, there you are now,’ cried the Psychologist, seizing on a point, ‘You can’t alter nature. You might do wonders with lighting tricks, but you can’t replace whole scenes every tenth of a second.’
‘Then we’ll put it on film,’ explained the Producer. ‘Use the Time Traveller himself “live,” and convey the passage of Time by back projection—but that’s a technical matter. We ought to cover 800,000 years or so in two-and-a-half minutes.’
The Man-in-the-Corner, thinking hard all this time, produced his trump card.
’And what, may I ask, does a Time Machine look like?’
The Designer looked puzzled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘It’s . . . it’s sort of . . . oh, you know.’ and he began to demonstrate vaguely with his hands, rather like a salesman selling one of those American cars that may be either coming or going.
‘It was all nuts and bolts and cog wheels and bits of jutting machinery in my days,’ said the Man-in-the-Corner, meaning to be helpful.
‘Rubbish,’ declared the Designer. ‘Any man of science engaged on such a project would think in terms of curves and parabolas and all that.’
Then I thought of something. ‘But,’ I said, ‘The Time Machine is a fantastic story told by one man. What about dialogue?’
‘I shall have to write it, that’s all’ was the Producer’s only answer.
‘Maybe, but the Morlocks and Eloi didn’t speak any understandable language. Wells gave little idea of how they spoke.’
No? And suppose he did? Suppose there were a Morlock or Eloic language and we did put the play in it? That wouldn’t achieve what we set out to do, would it?’
Which is as good an answer as any. And so the discussion went on. That was three weeks ago. The Producer (Robert Barr) and Designer (Barry Learoyd) have used up a lot of pencils and paper since then and we shall see their version of The Time Machine this week. It should be interesting.
After attending that gathering, I suspect that you’ve already run out to check that your rooftop aerial is still securely attached and pointing toward the BBC transmitter. And now you’re curled up in front of your brand new 1949 EkcoVision TS105 with its nine-inch cathode ray tube—certainly the best 39 gns. you’ve ever spent—ready to tune in to the broadcast. Here’s what you would have seen had you been sitting with John Carnell of Fantasy Review on that Tuesday night in January 1949:
Television Takes to Fantasy
by John Carnell
from p. 2 of Fantasy Review, Volume 3 No. 14, April/May 1949
Over fifty years ago. a young writer who was destined to become world-famous for his imaginative conceptions of things to come sat down and wrote his first successful fantasy. It was the story of an inventor who fashioned a machine on which he journeyed into the future, stopped off to take a look at mankind in the year 802701. and travelled on into the dim vistas of the world’s end before returning to the security of the 19th Century. It is said that Wells’ tale of “The Time Machine” set the early British film pioneer, Robert Paul, thinking about the possibilities of the screen play. It has even been suggested that the author himself may have been influenced, if only subconsciously, by the awakening technique of the new art form when he wrote his amazing tale. At any rate, he and Paul got together in a project which, if it had not failed for lack of capital, might have resulted in the filming of the Time Traveller’s adventures—or, at least, in an attempt at something which even today’s filmmakers would scarcely dare to tackle.
But could he possibly have dreamed, in 1894 (any more than we did only a few months ago), that “The Time Machine” would be presented to an audience of thousands, sitting comfortably in their own homes before their television screens in 1949? In spite of difficulties which were readily recognised, such an ambitious production was not too much for the B.B.C. to attempt; and if they did not succeed to the extent of satisfying the armchair critics of the Press—one of whom described it, with a yawn, as “The Crawl of Time”—at least they were quick to see in the brave try the making of television history.
There were, actually, two attempts [at the broadcast], the first having caused such a furore of caustic comment* that several revisions calculated to improve the whole production were made in the second showing. Even then viewers who looked-in on both versions found difficulty in deciding which version was the better. But it was generally agreed that “The Time Machine” had been worth the tune and trouble—and the money—spent on it. For the fantasy fan, especially, it was a momentous event, indicative of the shape of things to come in TV.
* Especially by Observer critic W. E. Williams, who condemned “the ill-fated endeavour to confine the cosmic vision of H. G. Wells upon a miniature screen. Its resources,” he argued, “are too pathetically meagre to cope with such a story .
. . and its cardboard improvisations of the landscapes of Utopia reduced the fable to banality. The impersonation of the creatures who inhabited Futurity was another exposure of the limitations of the medium, and the delicate little citizens of the Golden Age (with their sinister troglodyte guardians) proved a mere rabble of pantomime elves dressed in horrible costumes.”
The first announcement of the play caused quite a controversy over the courageous bid of producer Robert Barr and scene designer Barry Learoyd to present this corner-stone of science fiction in a medium to which, it seemed to the sceptics, it was quite unadaptable. The discussions between the producer and his staff over the ticklish technical problems it raised were the subject of an article in The Radio Times. How could they give an impression of the passing of hundreds of thousands of years in the space of some three minutes? How to design sets strictly limited in size to really look like a bizarre world of the distant future? How to show the Morlocks in their dark underground domain?
An article in Illustrated, with three pages of stills and pictures of the production in the making, appearing after the first showing, revealed how some of these difficulties were overcome. It also reported how it was proposed to vary the second production to meet the criticism that the whole thing amounted to no more than “an exercise in elementary fretwork,” in which buildings of the future had been cut out of futuristic photographs or plastic spheres, and mounted in frames only eight inches high before being made into film sequences.
My own reaction, on the first showing, was that “The Time Machine” was a first-class job of television, considering the limitations of Alexandra Palace with which all viewers are familiar through the Press. I thought Mr. Barr had succeeded, as far as anyone could expect with such a difficult subject, in making the show enjoyable and, at the same time, understandable to the majority of viewers. But the gentlemen of the Press, ever ready with their blunt instruments to do murder for the sake of a new angle, thought otherwise: so much so that the B.B.C., for the second showing, made changes in the dialogue and chopped pieces from the time-travel sequences in an attempt to pacify the reviewers and give those of its viewers who found it hard to swallow a better chance to appreciate the implications of the idea right from the first scene.
Condensed to a little less than an hour, the play opened with the Time Traveller, played by Russell Napier, discussing his theories with his friends after dinner. He shows them a model of the Time Machine, and while they watch, it slowly fades from the table on which it is resting. Then he shows them, in another room, the actual machine on which he proposes to travel, but they are even more sceptical and leave him to his reverie. Impatient to prove his case, the Traveller mounts the machine (a beautifully designed contraption) and sets off into the future.
In the first showing, after a brief interval in which the hands of the wall-clock recorded the passing of many hours, the lights began to dip and rise to indicate the passage of the days, and as this effect speeded up the walls of the room gradually dissolved. In the second performance this was cut out, killing the impression of fast-moving time. But, outside, the sun moves ever more swiftly across the sky until it is a continuous band of light, rising and falling to indicate the equinoxes, and throwing into vivid relief the changing shapes of successions of buildings which become more startlingly futuristic as the Traveller flashes through the ages.
Eventually the buildings are replaced by domes and peculiar stilted erections, and as they fade the Traveller arrives in the era of the Eloi. These were played entirely by small women and children, the Traveller towering above them like a god—which they imagined him to be—and the difficulty of their speech was easily overcome by limiting their vocabulary to shrill laughs and twitterings.
The action became slower as the Traveller, having surveyed his surroundings, discussed the past and mused upon the present with the uncomprehending Weena. but grew in suspense with his discovery of the fact that the 
Morlocks had abstracted the Time Machine and his futile efforts to recover it. On his descending into the depths where these degenerate machine-minders performed their mysterious tasks, it was completely dark and all the viewers saw of them was their glowing eyes moving in the blackness.
Escaping their clutches, the Traveller returns to the surface and the pathetically hopeless ministrations of Weena, with whom he tries to seek out a refuge for the Eloi against the depredations of the Morlocks. Thus he stumbles on a derelict museum where he finds decayed books and live matches before they are driven out by the Morlocks—who again remain unseen by the audience. To keep them at bay, he lights a fire, but Weena disappears and he returns to make another assault on the entrance to the underworld. He finds the door open, and his machine just inside, whereupon he continues his journey into the future and witnesses an eclipse at the world’s end.
Throughout this sequence, Napier continued to tell the story of his adventure while viewers saw a shadowy scene in which a swollen sun hung in the sky above a dismal landscape dotted with stagnant pools of water. In the second performance, due to overrunning, this was hurried through and must have left a confused impression in the viewer’s mind. Arriving back in his laboratory, the Traveller is revived by his friends, and is almost convinced that he has dreamed it all until he puts his hand in his pocket and finds a flower that Weena had given him. The show ends with the camera focussing on the exotic bloom from the future as he holds it in his hand.
Although there had been obvious amendments in the script and the scenic effects, such promised items as giant land crabs, fantastic birds and beasts, which were scheduled to appear in the sequence showing the twilight of the world (and which, it was admitted, were not ready for the first screening), did not materialise in the second showing. But in spite of its faults, “The Time Machine” on television was one of the most successful attempts yet made in any pictorial medium to portray an imaginative conception of the future. With the exception of “Things to Come,” it far outrivalled any similar attempt by the film world, which has such a variety of tricks at its command.
It was a much more satisfying production than last year’s television excursion into fantasy, “R.U.R.,” which was totally devoid of futuristic feeling. Then, the sense of world crisis was killed by the use of a single setting for the entire performance, whereas the present technique of “mixing” prepared telecine films with “live” scenes might have made Capek’s drama as animated as his robots. But it is significant that the B.B.C. is giving so much time and attention to fantasy themes and putting such presentations over with increasing skill.
During the past few months, we have been able to look-in on several Weird plays, outstanding among which was Jean Cocteau’s “The Infernal Machine,” a title that belied the nature of the plot. Brilliantly acted against a background of ever-changing sets, complete with all the mystery of ancient Egypt, Anubis the wolf-man, and the beautiful keeper of the temple of the Sphinx, it might have come from the pages of Weird Tales of years ago. Among ghost plays, we have had an excellent production of J. B. Priestley’s “Jenny Villiers.” And often on Saturday nights we are regaled by the creepy tales of Algernon Blackwood, sitting nonchalantly in an easy chair and improvising as he goes along, gesturing and grimacing good-naturedly, quite heedless of the camera a few inches from his face. Fantasy fans who love his books are not alone in delighting in these occasions; he is probably television’s most popular performer.
And we can hope for even more, and possibly better, futuristic presentations, according to Illustrated. That is, if Mr. Barr’s further ambitions are realised. Among his plans are “a trip to the Moon, based on the official plans of the (British) Interplanetary Society . . . another story probing into the problem of Time,” and one about the lost continent of Atlantis. Says Charles Hamblett, author of the article: “If young Mr. Barr has his way, televiewers are heading for a strange and unpredictable future.” If he does, we may see fantasy developing in a form for which it seems to us peculiarly fitted, in spite of the reluctance of the critics to admit of its possibilities.
Yes, Boomer, those certainly were the days. And as for next month, we have an 1892 Christmas story in store for you with a unique form of time manipulation that foreshadows Groundhog Day, although arguably with no actual time travel. We hope you’ll be here for a Christmas week edition of Time Travel Nexus Presents W. D. Howells’ “Christmas Every Day.”
Other credits: The first still is from bbc.com, and the other two are from the ITDb.