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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 12h

The picture is Geoff Andrew hosting this morning's delightful, heart-warming, funny, moving and appropriately laudatory memorial event for Tony Rayns at King's College. I came of age reading Tony in 'Time Out', invariably with a touch of awe....

A large projection shows an image of the film critic Tony Rayns, with a QR code and the words 'Tony Rayns 1948-2026); before it and to the left of the image a man with a microphone stands behind a desk speaking to an unseen audience.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 19h

Geoff Andrew hosting the memorial event for Tony Rayns at King’s this morning…

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Does anyone else find the new @artfund.bsky.social poster campaign for National Art Pass weird? "This gave my brain the afternoon off"! Are we not supposed to think in galleries? Are we being encouraged simply to look at art in an empty-headed manner?

Poster for National Art Fund Art Pass photographed at Balham tube station; poster features a man in a gallery looking at a fantastical painting paired with the slogan, "This gave my brain the afternoon off".

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Not quite yet - there are other distractions - but soon, very soon.

Book of The Rouse by China Miéville, laid on a wooden tabletop.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Always a delight to walk by the bonkers memorial to Arthur Sullivan in the gardens on Victoria embankment.

Memorial topped by a bronze bust of Arthur Sullivan on a stone pillar against which is draped a mourning semi-naked woman in bronze.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

New record price for a cappuccino, at WatchHouse, Somerset House: £4.40

A cardboard coffee cup on a table top, with a Georgian facade in the distance behind.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Perfect day for Kent vs Middlesex at Canterbury.

A cricket match being played beneath a bright blue sky flecked with white clouds.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Absolutely loved S2 of The Four Seasons www.netflix.com/tudum/the-fo...

Five actors from the cast of The Four Seasons in their roles sitting around a table.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

A somewhat random discovery today at the BBC Written Archives Centre, written just six weeks after the Coronation of the late Queen.

Text of a memo from Head of Films, Television.
Subject: COMMENTARY POINT ON ROYAL STORIES
16th July, 1953.
I have today been informed that the Queen dislikes such phrases as "The Queen accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh", and "The Queen with the Duke of Edinburgh".
Wherever the appropriate occasion arises she wishes the narrative to be "The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh"
Please see that this formula is scrupulously observed
Signed by P. H. Dorté.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Last week of holiday reading: Richardson's 'Pamela', and Jorg Spater's biography of Kracauer. I skim read Pamela's last third, which is pious and tedious. I dipped in and out of Kracauer, but it's not a biography to read straight through; extraordinary scholarship, but so, so detailed...

Two books on a table top, visible by their spines: Richardson's Pamela and Spater's Kracauer, a biography.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Great birthday present! A huller that extracts the core from strawberries - and it works brilliantly. Can’t think how I have got through life without one.

Hand holding a red device with a green button, from the end of which four small metal claws protube.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

End of the first week of our holiday, and from my ambitious reading list (www.facebook.com/JohnWyver/po...) I have spent almost all of my time with 'David Copperfield', which I finished, with a great sense of loss, yesterday. What a truly marvellous creation!

The Penguin edition of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and 'The Westerners' by Megan Kate Nelson seen spine on, lying on a table.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Wandering through the backstreets of Beaune we come across a rather wonderful monument to the late 19C chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey.

Statue of a man seated in a chair with a monument behind him on which running horses are carved in low relief.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Honoured to be mentioned @thetimes.com guide today [£] celebrating the BBC Ibsen archive @bbciplayer.bsky.social and especially the 1953 Lady from the Sea - thanks to @andrewmale.bsky.social www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-r...

Streaming choice
The Lady from the Sea
BBC iPlayer
Writing at illuminationsmedia.co.uk, the UK TV historian John Wyver has highlighted the archive of Henrik Ibsen adaptations languishing in the dark corners of BBC iPlayer. The best is a restored print of The Lady from the Sea, first shown in 1953 and, as Wyver notes, "one of the very earliest television dramas to be preserved in the archives". As he observes, the performance of Irene Worth as Ellida, the lighthouse keeper's daughter trapped in an unhappy marriage, is what makes this an essential watch. The play follows the restless Ellida over three days as her demands for freedom and yearning for her lost sailor lover escalate. Andrew Male

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Spending the day trying to read documents on a microfiche viewer; media archaeology-inspired nostalgia did not last long.

Picture of antiquated monitor on a desk with faint type on screen, with a printer next to it.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Scaffolding all down from one of my favourite London facades, Tournament House at Paddington.

Shot looking up at Art Deco facade of office building.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Scaffolding all down from one of my favourite London facades, Tournament House at Paddington.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Very happy to reunite Magic Rays of Light with the original of the painting used on the cover, Harry Rutherford’s Starlight at BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham.

Book cover for Magic Rays of Light held up in front of the painting used on the cover, Harry Rutherford’s Starlight, 1937, at the BBC Written Archive Centre.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Had never noticed before the wonderful lettering on the Mount Pleasant sorting office building; London locations on top; British places below. Glorious.

Facade of office building in sunshine with large windows and two rows of lettering.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

This brightened my morning - on the underside of a toilet lid on a SWR train from Waterloo to Bournemouth.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Delighted to be giving an online talk about British television in the 1920s and 1930s for the Art Deco Society on the evening of 17 March; tickets £5 for non-members. artdecosociety.uk/events-2/

Graphic featuring a colour painting of a man and woman in evening dress standing by an antique chair and facing a television camera and operator from the 1930s.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Can't resist - sorry. Magic Rays of Light spotted by my brilliant copy editor Liz Hudson in Waterstones Piccadilly

Book Magic Rays of Light by John Wyver tucked into a bookshop shelf next to Adolescence: The Scripts.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

From time to time I amuse myself posting photos of elaborate assemblies of scaffolding that I encounter; this impressive frontage is just opposite the London Palladium.

A highly elaborate, very tall assembly of scaffolding on a building frontage, on a London street at night.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Current NFT2 ticketing for the Television Arrives! screening of early documentaries this evening at 6.15pm.

Seating plan for the auditorium of NFT2 at BFI Southbank showing G9 as the only a single available seat.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

For more than 60 years I have had tinned grapefruit for Christmas Day breakfast; today is not the day to break that tradition. Happy Christmas 🎄

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Here’s another body part by the same painter

Detail of painting showing a naked arm against a white sheet; the hand is holding a quill; there is a bloody knife on the ground.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

… here’s a detail from one of the paintings I saw. Whose feet?

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

I have been in Paris today, looking at art, and I have had a very good time…

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Well that was worth getting up for - ha!

Screen showing Mitchell Starc having dismissed Ben Duckett for a golden duck.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Spike Lee at excellent q&a after screening of Highest2Lowest this morning - and just before he went to the derby. Loved the film (apart from maybe the final 15 minutes), which is a quintessential NYC movie, and a movie about NYC movies: Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, French Coonection are its forbears.

Portrait of director Spike Lee in full Arsenal kit.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

‘Australia trails…’ or ‘Australia trail…’; I would have thought the latter #Ashes #pedantry

Detail of screen shot of Ashes coverage including graphic ‘Australia trails by 115 runs’.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

These digital ads imposed on the side shots in #Ashes coverage make the space of the field feel really strange.

Screen shot of Ashes cricket with prominent electronic advertising

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Here’s that side shot with three brands. Not the BBC is it?

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

… and three more (!) brands, electronically imposed, in the less-often-used side shot @TNT Sports.

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Four (!) on-field brands in the wide shots at TNT Sports coverage…

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

How completely weird is this! But nice too. Doing some reading about director Tony Richardson (ahead of an intro next month at BFI Southbank), I opened at random Don Radovich's 1995 'Tony Richardson: A Bio-Bibliography, published by Greenwood Press in 1995. And I found this...

Extract from a book which reads:
'B180 Wyver, John.
The Moving Image: An International History of Film,
Television and Video. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Published in cooperation with the British Film Institute, Wyver's overview of the history of moving images is wonderfully entertaining, concise, and informative. At a little over three hundred well -illustrated pages, it is one of the best short and manageable one-volume references available. Richardson's contributions to British film, from Free Cinema to Woodfall, are briefly covered.'

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Courtauld cafe after the Wayne Thiebaud exhibition 🙂

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Only two rooms, but a stellar show

Painting in thick paint of a lone coffee mug on a yellow ground

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud at Courtauld, Somerset House

Painting detail of a pink cake on a stand, done with thick luscious paint

Painting detail of a yellow cake on a stand, done with thick luscious paint

Painting detail of a pink cake with cherries on a stand, done with thick luscious paint

Painting detail of a yellow layered cake on a stand, done with thick luscious paint

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

... and that's me done, I think - proofs, queries, final checks, the lot.

Image of the Contents page of my forthcoming book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, with the following text:
List of figures vi
List of abbreviations vi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1 'Practical television is here' 17
2 'And so we progress' 57
3 The importance of Isidore 96
4 Starting out at Alexandra Palace
5 Putting on a show 173
6 Dramatic success 219
7 The world elsewhere 265
8 Cinema's challenges 319
9 Looking in 356
Coda: The war and the future 397
Selected bibliography 404
Notes 423
Index 498

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Illuminations @illuminations.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

You can hardly read it, but it says, Everybody Needs a Place to Think, BBC Four. Installed on London’s South Bank benches for channel’s launch. A lifetime ago.

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