Radio's First Royal Command
(Special to "The Listener" by
Geraldine
Grey
‘THE first British Broadcasting Corporation programme to receive the honour of a Royal Command was Tommy Handley’s non-stop high-speed wise-cracking show "It’s That Man Again." Listeners to the BBC shortwave service are better acquainted with "Tommy Handley’s Half-hour" — the
weekly programme specially designed for the overseas audience. , The occasion of "I.T.M.A’s" Command Performance was the recent birthday of Princess Elizabeth. What does it feel like, we asked Handley, to present for a visible audienceand a Royal one at that-a radio show devised for unseen and unseeing listeners.
" Well, I expected: to feel very nervous, but everything was so informal, so free from Court ceremony-just a party celebrated in the family circle-that all our apprehensions vanished. We gave a replica of our broadcast just as it is done in the studio. On the small stage in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle we had the full orchestra, conducted as usual by Charlie Shadwell; we had scripts, and even microphones, as well as the little "effects" boy with his table and gadgets. He was thrilled beyond words. The artists wore their ordinary clothes. "We expanded the programme to forty minutes instead of the usual thirty in order to bring in the full company of characters in the series. Their Majesties and the Princesses appeared to know them all." (A cartoon, by Wyndham Robinson, of the chief figures in Tommy Handley’s programme, is shown on the left.)
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19420904.2.30
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 12
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245Radio's First Royal Command New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 12
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